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Crime Visualization of San Francisco

padmapper.com

11–20 of 66 posts

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#12
Unrelatedly, PadMapper is excellent (better than other Craigslist mappers I could find): it has a great filtering system, seems to fetch fresh results more often, and can alert you about new places. I found my current place using it.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#13
This is very interesting. A friend of mine who lived on Frederick St, just a few blocks up the hill from Haight, said that crime was much lower on her block. Her theory was that bad guys didn't like to climb hills. And in fact there seems to be a correlation between altitude and crime rate.

There are probably other reasons too. E.g. that the hills are fancier neighborhoods.

But her explanation makes sense. If you're walking around looking for someone to rob, why walk up steep hills?

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#14
If you want more details, sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org has them, or you can download the raw data from datasf.org. The hot spot at 16th Street BART is drug dealers and in practice there is no reason not to go there.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#15

So most of Hunter's Point is crime free? Is this data correct?

I would guess that people just don't call the cops as much in bayview/Hunter's Point.

Not so sure about that: http://www.crimereports.com/map?search=94124&searchButto...

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#16
post #6
post #2

This is a new visualization layer on PadMapper (an apartment hunting site) which shows the relative frequency of crime in different areas of San Francisco. It's not differentiated between nonviolent crime and violent crime currently (should be at some point). Red is bad, green is good, and nothing means very little crime reported for that area (even better than green within the bounds of SF, simply no data outside).

That's an interesting feature for an apartment hunting site. However I think you have to add some information like the time-interval this goes back to. If it's only for a couple of days the statistic might be full of relative false-positives and false-negatives.

Ah yeah, I should specify that. The data window is the past 58 weeks or so.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#17
post #14

If you want more details, sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org has them, or you can download the raw data from datasf.org. The hot spot at 16th Street BART is drug dealers and in practice there is no reason not to go there.

I'm going to have to disagree. Its accessibility via the muni and the bart, combined with the proximity to the hard-drug areas of town means that there are a number of quick and dirty smash-n-grab robberies of transient ne'er-do-wells. Admittedly I'm biased because I experienced a single one of those datapoints first-hand.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#18
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. It currently needs to be precomputed as images, so it's hard to make it customizable, but it probably makes sense to make a category of unsavory crimes. I would assume that most people dislike living near the same types of crime.

How are you precomputing the images? I thought GMaps provided a way to input data and get a heatmap, but apparently I'm mistaken.

I couldn't find anything to that effect, so I wrote custom scripts. Basically, it creates an image pixel by pixel, with the pixel value corresponding to the crime density of that chunk of the map, blows it up, smooths it with a Gaussian kernel, and then uses some GIS tools to warp it and chop it up into tiles for different zoom levels.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#19
post #12

Unrelatedly, PadMapper is excellent (better than other Craigslist mappers I could find): it has a great filtering system, seems to fetch fresh results more often, and can alert you about new places. I found my current place using it.

Thanks :-) Glad it was useful!

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#20
post #13

This is very interesting. A friend of mine who lived on Frederick St, just a few blocks up the hill from Haight, said that crime was much lower on her block. Her theory was that bad guys didn't like to climb hills. And in fact there seems to be a correlation between altitude and crime rate. There are probably other reasons too. E.g. that the hills are fancier neighborhoods. But her explanation makes sense. If you're…

Have you seen the one that plots crimes as if they were elevation? http://dougmccune.com/blog/2010/06/05/if-san-francisco-crime...
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