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Crime Visualization of San Francisco

padmapper.com

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#31
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…

Interesting theory. This might also be what gives the Tenderloin its' northern boundary somewhere around Post St, as Nob Hill starts rising more sharply north of there.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#33
I made CrimeDeskSF (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/crimedesksf/id339706696?mt=8) to visualize some of this data on the iPhone, including a mostly-gimmicky-but-kinda-fun augmented reality view (drug bust 100ft away!). I'm using the datasf.org datasets for mine (not sure how they compare to the crimespotting ones, or if they're the same).

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#35
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…

[deleted]

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#36
post #34

Is this normalized by the population density or foot traffic in an area? If not, it's going to be hard to use to estimate personal risk.

It isn't. My theory is that crime density by land area alone probably gives a decent estimate of how the area feels to live in. IE: if there's an assault or robbery every week in a one block area where you live, it's going to feel like a seedy place to live regardless of your personal risk of being involved in a crime.

I doubt there's an objectively right answer as to how to best normalize this - I think it just matters that it be understood by the user what it means. There are a number of ways to normalize it depending on what you care about.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#37
post #8

No luck getting the presidio data?

That's very likely just a function of population density - this is raw crime density by land area.

EDIT: There's a crime density cutoff below which areas are blank. Within the bounds of SF, blank means very low crime density.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#38
post #23

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

This is why I'd like to do violent/nonviolent versions. I've heard it described that the Tenderloin has a lot of non violent crime, and that Hunter's Point has much more violent crime. Ultimately, I'd rather be in the Tenderloin if that's the case. I believe the data is correct, but I'm not sure what the SF police's data policies are. There could be some withholding, etc. The data comes from http://sanfrancisco.crime…

The San Francisco Police link to http://www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/sanfrancisco from their page at http://sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1618 which has some discussion of their data policies.

Re: Crime Visualization of San Francisco

#40
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.

I concur. Padmapper gives me a quality of life advantage over my peers since I can find exactly what I want and monitor for deals while they're getting the luck of the draw off CList.
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