math-ias/crime-lite.com

A hackathon project I did with my friends (the 5 Racketeers) at Boston University to visualize crime and streetlight data.

5Racketeers

We don't use Racket here, we use BSL (Boston Hacks 2018).

About crime-lite.com

As part of a hackathon my friends and I were looking for ways to visualize data in Boston. This was part of the Data for Urban Good track at MLH's BostonHacks.

Your hometown works every day to improve the quality of life for its residents. Help out your local city/town by utilizing their robust datasets and collecting insights for urban improvements.

We decided to try and build a visualization of crime and street-lamp data available from data.boston.gov.

Our initial hypothesis was that there was a positive correlation between a lack of streetlamps in one area, and the amount of crime in that area but from our analysis of the data that was not the case. We then also studied the distance between streetlamps and the crime that occured in that area and found similar results that there was no relationship.

Below is the devpost article that my friend Hayden wrote about the experience.

Inspiration

We wanted to find data that was relevant to communities and gave them information they may need at any time.

What it does

It gives a user data on if their surroundings are unsafe based on the past criminal record of the area and the number of street lights in the area, and also give visual data on how the city of Boston could become a safer place by installing street lights in certain areas. There are two different visual representations; one is a heatmap that contains a dot representing each of the street lights in Boston. In the graph, you can toggle the heatmap on and off, toggle the gradient (which changes the color of the heatmap), toggles the radius (makes the radius in between indexes of each gradient increase), and toggles the opacity (there are also multiple different color palettes that are fun to try out!). The second graph is a map split up into hundreds of red rectangles, each of them containing valuable information about the data inside of the area if the user right clicks.

How we built it

We used data from the official site for Boston (data.boston.gov) and created multiple python files that found the distance from a crime to the closest street light, subdivided Boston into many "cells" and recieved information such as the number of crimes in the area, number of lights in the area, maximum, minimum and median distance from a crime to the closest street light, and exported this information to Javascript (Almost all of the number crunching was done using a VM through Google's Compute Engine in their Cloud API). From there, the graphs were created using Javascript in association Google Maps API for the background to the graphs and the visual representation, as well as with CSS and HTML for the UI. Finally CSS and HTML were used for the front end to create the tabs and the visuals for the website.

Challenges we ran into

The size of the data set was incredibly large (~330,000 crimes and ~70,000 street lights to compare). Therefore, we had to use a mix of multicore processing, division of the workload into over 6000 different chunks (Geohashes), and simple random sampling that could run in 50 minutes using the Google Compute Engine (part of the Google Cloud API). Also, reading the data format and putting it in a graphic format using Google Maps was a problem for us. This included figuring out how to transport that data (CSV->JSON). Finally, we ran into many small challenges such as technical errors including rounding of floats in python, which caused some of our data values to be skewed (this was fixed by using a python library named mpmath), as well as correctly formatting some of the pictures on the website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of the product that we have created because of the impact that we know it could have on those in Boston who may find themselves unsafe. Also, we are proud of the way our website works and looks in conjunction with Google's tools (both for Maps and for cloud computing). What we learned

How to learn with big data, how to convert from programming languages, multiple different python libraries such as geohash and mpmath (for incredibly precise numbers while calculating the distances), using the haversine formula to calculate the distance between two points in terms of latitude and longitude.

What's next for Crime-Lite.com

Many more revisions including more data sets, streets, and more!

Screenshots

How to build the site.

I chose to remove the large blobs of data that we collected and processed because I believe it's much more important to show the source code of the work we did. Large files would also make it a less portable project.

1. Start by downloading the crime reports data set and the streetlamp data set in the csv file format. There are links to this in the above About section.
2. Prune the data in the crime report csv file with any spreadsheet or computer program to remove all columns such that only three columns remain, the offense code (as the first column), the latitude (as the second column), and the longitude (as the third). The streetlamps data set should be pruned such that the only columns are the latitudes (1st) and the longitudes (2nd).
3. Run light-transfer.py. You may have to rename your files according to what's listed in the python files. This will usually be light-edited.csv for streetlamps, and crime-edited.csv for crimes from the top of my head.
4. Run data.py. Like the above this will build a huge javascript array of crime locations (the above did light locations).
5. Run dataanalysis.py This will create a csv file of summaries of cells.
6. Finally run parseoutcsv.py. You may have to move files around so that they match again. This was previously done on a manual basis.

This was a long manual process we did once, and then worked on our data visualization after that.