Our resident data slinger sent me an initial analysis of time series data for specific crime hot spots in San Diego, and the results are interesting. Rather than look at the whole of the region at once, we’ve identified specific high intensity areas, and are doing time-series analysis for them independently. The major areas are: North Park, … Read more
An earlier post commented on an XKCD cartoon that was related to a common misinterpretation of crime maps, and I’d noted that it would be interesting to find the difference between the maps, as we had done for violent and property crime. Some of us think about interesting things, and others do them, Paul Breed … Read more
On Wednesday March 6 we’ll kick off our Crime Data Analysis project, and before then, it may be worth asking “Why are a bunch of amateurs attempting what the police should be doing? ” The answer is that police departments analyze crime to catch criminals, and the Data Library analyzes crime to help residents understand their … Read more
Citizens of any skill level are invited to help us analyze crime in San Diego neighborhoods. Use your knowledge of the community or technical skill to create maps, discover anomalies, and better understand the causes and solutions to crime in San Diego. Come to the Kickoff meeting by signing up at Meetup.com Crime is always … Read more
This weekend, Saturday Feb 23, is International Open Data Day, sponsored by the Open Knowledge Foundation, and it is also Code Across America data, sponsored by Code for America. San Diego is participating, hosted by Open San Diego, and the Library staff will be there to talk about the Library and our Crime Mapping Project. … Read more
I shouldn’t be surprised that for any interesting technical idea, XKCD covered it first, and better. Here is another view of the issue we covered regarding crime mapping: crime is most common where (a) there are a lot of people and (b) there is alcohol, and (b) is often the reason for (a). To go … Read more
As part of our upcoming Crime Mapping project, we’ve started producing maps of San Diego area cime incidents, and have made a few interesting discoveries that we’d like to share. While these aren’t ground-breaking insights, the results do confirm intuition and offer some small surprises. A few months ago we received and processed the SpotCrime.com … Read more
In preparing to formally launch the San Diego Regional Data Library, we’ve been spending a lot of time talking to nonprofits, community planing groups, city staff and city council members about their data needs. The staff for District 9 mentioned that Council member Marti Emerald is interested in infrastructure issues, particularly how crime is related … Read more
The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that encourages US citizens to volunteer, particularly for federal programs like AmeriCorps. They also have an excellent data site that provides statistics on civic engagement. We used their data extraction tool to pull a few datasets, which are posted on the Library’s data repository. Here is … Read more
Cities thrive when citizens get directly involved in working for their city. Not only do engaged residents solve problems and guide development, but the fact they got involved makes them love their city more, and encourages the people they socialize with to also care more about their city. Because loving something and watching it grow just feels good, creating … Read more