Crime is something we don't often talk about a lot, but it's something that we often have to talk about and are extremely interested in.  Typically, the discussion of crime arises when something happens in our neighborhood.  Crime breaks down into multiple forms: such as crime of theft, assault, murder, and even rape.  But like said, crime as it is attributed to neighborhood is the most relevant.  It's relevant because that's where we live, it's where our children go to school, it's where we frequent, it's where we build our community and networks, and it's where want to feel safe and at home. 

There is no question that mapping has become an important source of visual information, and the ability to access these forms of data information has only increased the past few years.  Many poeple have heard about Chicago Crime Map and the much celebrated Everyblock.  There's now more local crime watch websites popping up too, such as Oakland Crimespotting.  And now, there are the the up and coming national crime watch websites like CrimeReports.com and CrimeMapping.com, which would only allow the public to have greater access to being able to analyze crime on a larger scale.  

With this in mind, how would we want to view data about crime in our neighborhood?  If that's the most relevant data to us, hopefully it's with neighborhood boundary data, because from it you will be able to generate accurate demographic data about neighborhood regions and also pull up relevant crime reports.  Like we said in a previous post, neighborhoods are broken down often times by natural boundaries.  By natural boundaries we mean freeways, rivers, mountains, etc.  So as you would imagine, crime is very different on one side of the freeway and the other, and like wise, it's very different in one part of town and another.

I always find it really jarring when I see the vast difference in some neighboring neighborhoods.  One might get off the subway amongst a busy river of people shopping the big department stores, walk a few blocks, and all of a sudden be in one of the most impoverished parts of town.  That was my experience when I ended up in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.  But this is commonplace in almost every large city, such as Palo Alto in California where on one side you have Stanford University and East Palo Alto on the other side where there is so much crime.

At Factle Maps, we know that neighborhood correlations between different attributes are very significant.  Crime is related to concentration of wealth and poverty as much as housing prices often times have to do with school districts.   If we take neighborhood data, we will be able to do better research and find better solutions to the problems in our neighborhood.  But the challenge thus would be implentation and how to see successful changes.

To be continued...