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Show HN: Play with an interactive heatmap of SF crime (and other cities)
- hyuuu 2y agowhere did you source your data?
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoPublic datasets. You can view the sources for each city by expanding the "Data Sources" tab in the sidebar menu.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoYou need to divide crime counts by population density. Otherwise you're just plotting population density.
- xnx 2y agoDepends on how the map is being used. If I'm looking to avoid traveling through neighborhoods with a high robbery risk (e.g. as a tourist), I'd prefer absolute numbers vs. per capita.
- rachofsunshine 2y agoThat's probably not the correct analysis, because the number you're trying to estimate is not P(a crime occurs near you), it's P(you will personally be the victim of a crime). Crime rate over density won't necessarily do that either (since the population density of a primarily commercial+touristy area, e.g. Fisherman's Wharf, is << the number of people who are present there on a given day), but neither does raw count.
- mh- 2y agoI mean, I'd also be pretty interested in avoiding P(a crime occurs near you), especially as a tourist.
- chatmasta 2y agoYeah there are only 24 hours in a day, so the right metric might be density of crimes in an area per hour. Even if I’m not the victim of a robbery, I don’t really want to be watching it from across the street.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> I'd also be pretty interested in avoiding P(a crime occurs near you), especially as a tourist What counts as nearby also scales with density. Down the street is nearby in the suburbs. In New York the next avenue block may as well be another town.
- davedx 2y agoAs a tourist in SF recently I was interested in seeing the whole city, warts and all, and I did. I don't really understand why as a tourist you'd want to use this map for a short trip, unless you were going somewhere that's a literal war zone. Most cities just aren't statistically dangerous for a tourist unless you go out looking for trouble. You're much better off applying common sense than digging through digital maps of (reported) crimes. If I was looking for somewhere to live then it would be more interesting I think.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y agoI dunno, I'd think car break-ins would at least be a very important statistic. My wife and I will be spending a day in the Fisherman's Wharf area, and the statistics on car break-ins has me concerned, though a co-worker who lives in the Bay told me that if I'm parked in a parking garage, it's less likely I'll be a victim, as it's harder to smash-and-grab-and-go when you have to deal with a parking gate.
- whimsicalism 2y agoif you’re really worried, don’t leave anything in your car and don’t lock it
- itsyaboi 2y agoI don't understand this advice. Are you suggesting that if you make it easier for thieves to break into your car, they are less likely to damage it?
- whimsicalism 2y agoyes and also do not leave anything in your car
- davedx 2y agoYeah we parked across from the Exploratorium near there for several hours and it was fine, I didn’t think to consult crime heat maps before visiting, just followed standard common sense of not leaving visible ipads etc in the car. What is the actual car break in statistic there?
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoThanks for checking out the site and for the feedback. It's definitely something we're looking into. It's kind of an interesting question though because it somewhat varies by crime category. Take car break ins, for instance - this is more of a constant factor than a population density scalar because the number of parking spots is generally fixed on a per-block basis rather than scaling with population density. I think we might try to give users the option of dividing by population density but allow them to toggle this on/off.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aeturnum 2y agoParking turnover probably scales with population density. One of the reasons parking is more expensive in big cities is to encourage people to move their cars sooner. Smaller cities will have more cars that never move, where larger ones will have fewer.
- giantg2 2y agoIf it's about movement, then population density might not be the best factor either. You might need some other way to see the number of humans moving through a given area. Stuff like office buildings have higher populations during office hours, but wouldn't be caught in "population" metrics.
- yashap 2y agoYeah, I think having it as an option is the way to go. Though I’d personally have it default to per-capita, as I do think that correlates closer with actual risk. To illustrate with an extreme example, an area with 10 burglaries per 100 people is clearly a way higher burglary risk place to live than an area with 20 burglaries per 10,000 people.
- chatmasta 2y agoThe number of parking spots may be static, but the number of potential thieves scales with population density.
- postalrat 2y agoThat depends if people care more about crime happening to them or crime happening around them.
- whimsicalism 2y agothis is not a map of population density it’s pretty clear just the SRO strip/TL and then the two mission bart stations
- abeppu 2y agoBut it's interesting to see that this is not true for all crime categories. E.g. car break-in hotspots are by Fisherman's Wharf and the side of Alamo Square with the Painted Ladies -- i.e. prime tourist locations. However, I suspect there are some basic data errors upstream of this visualization tool that also limits its usefulness. E.g. 'rape' has a giant hotspot centered at the south side of the intersection of 8th and Mission ... which is site of a city Adult General Assistance office. I am guessing these are being tagged with the location where the victim gave a report, not the location where the crime happened.
- Spivak 2y agoIs it actually true that crime in an area increases proportionally with population? Why would it? Extremely high density but near zero crime would be inside a large office building.
- jazzyjackson 2y agothere's such a thing as a "target rich environment" but I always look at these maps as "where people are", college campuses, tourist attractions, crime is high because the number of marks is high, its a coincidence if many people happen to live there too
- spacebanana7 2y agoIt's an important truth that walking a mile in a high population density area puts you at a higher crime risk than walking a mile in a medium or low population density area.
- paraboul 2y agoNot really, since your chance of being a victim is divided by the number of people in the area.
- echelon 2y ago> Not really, since your chance of being a victim is divided by the number of people in the area. Depends on behavior. If I stay in my room all day, I don't contribute to your divisor. If Jack Dorsey doesn't walk around alone past midnight, he's not absorbing the same risk quotient either.
- roughly 2y ago> If Jack Dorsey doesn't walk around alone past midnight, he's not absorbing the same risk quotient either. Jack Dorsey is a weird motherfucker and a real outlier for this example. He used to walk to the Twitter office every day and generally looks and dresses like someone well outside his economic strata. I would not be surprised to find “midnight solo perambulations through the tenderloin” among his hobbies.
- aeturnum 2y agoIt's the opposite - right? There are more gross crimes in the high-density area, but your chance of suffering one is much lower (all else being equal). Trying to apply statistics directly like this is generally inaccurate, but to the degree the numbers say anything it's the opposite of what you say.
- spacebanana7 2y agoFair point, it's more complicated than I originally thought. Density increases the number of potential criminals you pass but also increases the number of alternative victims they could target. If you're a uniquely attractive/visibly wealthy personal walking home from a night out then the risk of passing more criminals dominates the advantage of alterative targets. After all, there's nothing really competing with you. However, if you look like normal person but happen to have a million dollar watch in your pocket then you're conceivably safer in a city. Because there'd be so many alternative victims who may be more attractive targets than you. Compared to the countryside robber who only gets a single target per night.
- jeffbee 2y agoAnd you have to use daytime, not resident, population estimates, or a combination.
- dheera 2y agoYes and no. Not dividing by population density ~ Probability I will become a crime victim by travelling through that area Dividing by population densitiy ~ Probability that I would be a crime victim if I live in that area
- binary132 2y agoNot necessarily, people may (or may not? maybe it’s regional) be more likely to victimize strangers.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- roughly 2y ago> Probability I will become a crime victim by travelling through that area Still not that. P(you’re the victim) = crime count/potential victim count. Population density may not be the right number for the denominator, but you need something in there.
- dheera 2y agoI could travel through a rural area with an extremely high per capita crime rate but my chances of encountering ANY person (good or bad) is low. I effectively avoid crime by avoiding people. If you live somewhere, you are forced to be a part of the community, which subjects you to the per capita rate.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zeckalpha 2y agoAnd the whole WWII plane meme concern... this is where crimes were caught/reported, not where they occurred.
- citrin_ru 2y agoDivided by population one of highest crime rate areas in the UK is Westminster because this are attracts a lot of tourists (some are targeted by pickpockets) but not much people live there (denominator is small). A better metric will be crime count divided by man-hours spent in the area per day. Such data unlikely exists in open access but mobile operators should be able to estimate it based on base station logs.
- pchangr 2y agoI don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with it. What is it that you think is misleading from this metric?
- citrin_ru 2y agoIt's not wrong but what people usually want to know looking at crime stats map is a probability to become a victim if they visit a particular place of will more to live there. Crime count divided by number of residents only relevant for crime targeting residents like home burglaries. For other cases these number can be no-representative.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIt should really be crime count by number of people out and about a day, but you will never have that number without some orwellian citizen surveillance program.
- RedlineTriad 2y agoAs always there is a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ So many geographic statistics just boil down to population density maps instead.
- cwmma 2y agothe issue is that the the specific population density is the density of workers, tourists, and people commuting through the area not the density of people who live there.
- whimsicalism 2y agoThe TL is high-crime and the Mission bart stations have crime. Not exactly shocking to anyone who has lived here
- aeturnum 2y agoI was interested to see that there are only really prostitution arrests in the middle of the mission!
- whimsicalism 2y agoyes, shotwell and capp are a pretty obvious corridor if you want to witness it ever
- muststopmyths 2y agoNicely done. Longer term historical data would be nice too, for comparison or trends. It should be available as these sorts of crime maps were all the rage 10-15 years ago. Personally, I would prefer that the crimes filter panel automatically hide itself when I click on the map after selecting my filter. Kudos.
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoThanks! Yeah, we definitely plan to add long term historical data and give users the option of diving deeper into the trends. Should be in the very near future. Thanks for the idea of auto-hiding the sidebar on a map click - that's very intuitive. Will probably push an update later today to add this.
- microtherion 2y agoIt's interesting to see how certain crimes (e.g. Assault and Robbery) have hotspots that map perfectly onto BART stops (16th & Mission, 24th & Mission).
- whimsicalism 2y agoit’s not surprising if you’ve ever lived in that area
- autoexecbat 2y agoIt is somewhat surprising actually. Presumably if there's an actual hotspot that police would be ever-present in the area until it dilutes out
- whimsicalism 2y ago> police would be ever-present in the area you live in the area? because your comment doesn’t sound like it
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- devvvvvvv 2y ago[flagged]
- boingo 2y agoStopping crime means arresting marginalized people, and SF leadership won't let that happen.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIf police were ever present dealing with crimes, that’s actually how we would see hotspots. No police, none of that gets reported, and bart stops fade into the background.
- duskwuff 2y ago
- burkaman 2y agoFYI none of your images are loading for me, they all return 301s repeatedly until the browser gives up.
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoHmm, thanks. Hopefully this doesn't include the map itself. Would you kindly provide the browser / OS combo you are operating? Will try and look into this.
- burkaman 2y agoFirefox, Windows. The map loads fine, just the icons don't work.
- delichon 2y agoLocation based danger zone notifications would be helpful. "Warning: You are entering an area with a large number of reported muggings."
- whimsicalism 2y agoor a warning every time you get into your car "Warning: locations like these have a significantly higher fatality rate"
- kjkjadksj 2y ago“Warning: its 8pm on a friday night and half the cars you see from here on out are drunk”
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoStay tuned for some exciting feature launches in the near future :)
- delichon 2y agoPlease let me configure it so that I can play Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone as my notification.
- mindwork 2y agoThere is an app called Citizen that notifies you about crime happening near you in real time
- gilmore606 2y agoDamn, the police should start using that app!
- mindwork 2y agoIt's vise versa. Citizen app listens to the police radio and puts the gps coordinates on the map with the descriptions taken from the police report. They have social network on top of that where people can submit videos and live videos
- tariverdiev1789 2y agoAwesome job, any chance of extending this to Europe? (Like Paris)
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoThank you! We are definitely interested in expanding to as many cities and countries as possible. We focused on large US cities with good datasets for this MVP, but depending on how things go, we will hopefully be expanding to cities across the world very soon.
- renewiltord 2y agoVery cool! Car Break-In useful for “safe to park here?”
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoThanks! Yeah unfortunately with cities like SF nowhere is truly "safe to park" but hopefully this helps people avoid the major hotspots!
- worstspotgain 2y agoIt's actually quite safe to park in SF with two exceptions: - With anything visible that might contain a valuable. Any devices in the trunk should be in Airplane Mode. If you're a tourist, don't park by a tourist trap. - Any model with an oft-stolen catalytic converter, esp. Prius. SF itself has higher-than-average tourist density, so it's a burgling destination too. But it's possible to park for decades and never have your car broken into.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- devvvvvvv 2y ago[flagged]
- calibas 2y agoAlso serves as a map of where to find prostitutes. Apparently, that's the area around South Van Ness & 20th St in SF.
- s1mon 2y agoCapp Street is the center of the issue - so much so that permanent bollards have been added to cut down on customers circling the blocks looking for people selling themselves. https://missionlocal.org/2024/04/barricaded-capp-street-parking-lot/ https://missionlocal.org/2024/04/barricaded-capp-street-park...
- autoexecbat 2y agoThanks for making this, it would be helpful if the city boundaries weren't so closely observed, most people don't care where the exact city lines are but have more of a feeling for the general metropolitan area as a blob
- dheera 2y agoI wish that too but it seems their data sources are the cities themselves so those cities don't report things outside their jurisdiction.
- mckn1ght 2y agoPretty wild that you can intuit the city boundary by using the car break-in stat, it’s the most evenly and widely distributed one I saw.
- jeffbee 2y agoThe location of the police stations seems influential. I know in Berkeley crimes without a firm location get geocoded to police HQ. Do you think that might be affecting these maps?
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoInteresting, thanks for the info. I think it hopefully should be OK for the currently supported cities. Lots of cities have 0,0 as the geo point for crimes without points, which we filter out. For others such as SF, it looks like the police HQ is in Mission Bay which doesn't seem to have a high crime rate for any category. This info would also hopefully be included in the dataset disclaimers, and we didn't see this in any of the datasets we use. But thanks for the info, this is great to know for any potential future expansions. If you see any cases where this might be happening for the currently supported cities, please don't hesitate to get into contact with us :)
- roughly 2y agoSF has several police districts and district stations - may be worth checking against those, too: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/sfpd-stations/station-finder https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/sfpd-stations/s...
- w10-1 2y agoGreat work! - The maps are pretty and scale nicely. The clarity and granularity of text is appreciated. - The controls are excellent. I might put the copy and help in the same single title/menu panel (without "viewing:" as obvious) Some other features I found myself wanting: - Visually bound the map so you can see when it can't be moved in a direction. Think about what to do when the control panel is open and the user is trying to drag the map to see what's under the panel (instead of closing the panel). - ability to sort data drill-down by number, to look at most prevalent - using gradients for data starts to break down at low numbers. I wonder if you can start putting dots under some threshold - time-range delta heat-maps: 2023 car break-ins vs 2022 (where green is improvement, red is worsening, and intensity is size of delta) - surfacing qualitative aspects of data sources: one or many (only police?); and perhaps user feedback on quality of data - curate super-categories, e.g., capturing all cocaine-related offenses, or distinguishing the stacked charges (loitering in the area of ...) from the operative ones (dealing), or crimes against (visiting?) strangers vs locals or friends. The data sources have their own arcane categorizing logic, and it's rarely what users actually want. - color-code user-specified combinations: prostitution + drugs vs either alone - Most of these relate to the kinds of questions users can answer with the maps, so if you have a (user-contributed?) panel with questions and their associated configuration sets, it would be very powerful and sticky. - Then it would be nice to apply the same configuration-set to different cities, and perhaps to see some comparison across cities Some things I wouldn't do: - All-caps, tm? ok, but... - I think putting safety under quality of life makes the product a bit less polarizing and hence more popular - which means adding other quality-of-life measures (e.g., zoning (residential/retail/manufacturing), cost/sf for housing, walkability scoring) E.g., it would be interesting to know which retail districts are super-safe.
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoThank you for the great suggestions. You've given us a lot of great ideas to think about. Much appreciated!!!
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y ago@dang or other HN mods - can you help me understand why this post was so rapidly downranked? It's now on the 6th page... it's got to be the highest upvoted yet lowest ranked post submitted today. As far as I can tell there were no flags or anything. Am I missing something here?
- dang 2y agoTwo things: (1) it set off the flamewar detector a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector; (2) users flagged it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- whimsicalism 2y agothis is probably the least flame-y thread about crime in SF I've ever seen on here
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoThank you for helping to resolve the situation! Please disregard the email reply I sent as the issue was clearly rectified.
- devvvvvvv 2y ago[flagged]
- nasaeclipse 2y agoDamn, wtf is going on at Little Saigon and that Park hotel?
- floren 2y agoIt's right smack in the Tenderloin
- s1mon 2y agoThis is very cool. I turned on all the types of crime and a weird set of diagonal darker regions appeared in the avenues. Either this is some weird artifact of the geocoding or there's some really strange magnetic fields or something affecting crime.
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoThanks. Yeah, we noticed this too. It seems to be just a strange quirk of the SF dataset, and only in the Richmond / Sunset districts. Or who knows, maybe it is true.
- GrowthStein 2y ago[flagged]
- breck 2y agoDo you have a version of this, but with positive data? For example, spots with great weather, or where acts of kindness frequently happen, or lots of photos get taken (so excellent views). Might be fun!
- jagtstronaut 2y agoThis is cool! You should add selfishly Raleigh NC
- insane_dreamer 2y agoZillow used to have this years ago, and they dropped it. I remember using it in 2016 when house hunting. Later in 2022 I noticed they had dropped it; I'm guessing it reduced the number of home buyers.
- xrd 2y agoCan anyone speak to whether public statistics are accurate or not? Can anyone reassure me that these statistics are impossible to manipulate? I have a suspicion these statistics are only accurate and available when it is convenient for the people responsible for providing those statistics. Isn't it the case that the police are responsible for providing statistics to the public? During the pandemic and during the George Floyd protests, there were political reasons for gathering information and using to show that A) "crime is up!" or B) "crime is actually still historically low!" A few years ago, I was frustrated about the reporting on these statistics, and went to a variety of police web sites. Some of the websites said: "Because of the pandemic, we are so overwhelmed by crime and everything, we cannot provide current statistics!" And, other sites said "Because of the pandemic, we are so overwhelmed by crime and everything, we cannot provide past statistics!" And, some websites just completely won't load. If a police department does not want to pay their IT person, or the company that provides it can't get their act together, the website will be down and you cannot get information directly from the police. If you have a category of crime that is high, the police need to either fix that problem, or fix the numbers. Right? I know that some sources of information come from the FBI. But, aren't those numbers often provided by the police? And, in certain parts of the country were in favor of defunding the police, and certain parts of the country are filled with "Blue Lives Matters" people. Won't the police in the defund areas want to show crime is up? Won't those in regions with different sensibilities want to show their policing works? Can anyone tell me why this isn't a problem? It is anecdotal, but aren't there areas of certain cities where the citizens have stopped reporting crimes because the police don't come anymore? How is that reflected in the numbers, if at all? Can anyone else see a big gaping hole in how these stats are collected and used? Is there standardization across the country about these statistics?
- jjeaff 2y agoI'm sure, like anything, there is incentive and opportunity to manipulate the numbers. but I don't think it would be easy to do without being found out. Police precincts do a lot of paperwork and behind any statistics, they are going to need the paperwork for individual cases to back up the numbers they submit. and if they are going to under report, they will need to destroy a lot of paperwork. but my intuition is that while leadership may want to under report crime, cops will usually want to report as much as possible to prove that they are busy and necessary. so the balance likely gets us acceptably accurate numbers.
- throwaway888abc 2y agoFilter by prostitution - Red light district guide ? Add more countries please
- katzinsky 2y ago[flagged]
- joshghent 2y agoHey, remember me? We met randomly on a bus from Machu Picchu to Cusco a couple weeks ago! First "orange site" people I've met IRL lol. Great work on this - very slick UX and super quick. Be cool to expand it to support the UK or maybe develop some open standard for the way data can be reported. I'm sure businesses would pay for a consolidated data api.
- SafemapTecnolgs 2y agoHey Josh! I was wondering whether you'd see this! Thanks for checking out the site - we'd love to expand to the UK and to add an API, thanks for the ideas. It was great meeting you and chatting with you on that bus ride, hope you folks had a nice rest of your trip! And hope things are going well with LoginLlama and the other cloud storage related project you were talking about. Let me know if you ever need some beta testing done or something like that :)
- artembugara 2y ago@SafemapTecnolgs, we (newscatcherapi.com, YC S22) are helping one of the largest NGOs build an interactive map of all reported corruption cases. We collect over 1M national and hyper-local news in near real-time. Happy to help with collecting crime info from public news. I'm happy to help for free; we'll also pay to develop & host information extraction using LLM! Anyone, feel free to email me artem@newscatcherapi.com
- ThisNameIsTaken 2y agoThis map makes me think of the New Inquiry's White Collar Crime map [1]. That project creates a strong image which for me disrupts the stereotype of what crime looks like and where we can find it. I realize it has a very different aim than safemap, but I frequently use it as an example of how the selection of data sources and its visualization is crucial in communicating a particular story. This communication already starts with the name: calling a map of reported crime a 'safemap' implicitly suggests that red colored places are 'unsafe' and should be avoided. (The about popover literally states: "Learn which parts of San Francisco are safest and which parts are best to avoid.") Which, as the discussion here suggests might be more complicated than that. [1]: https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/ https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/
- devvvvvvv 2y ago[flagged]
- MrBuddyCasino 2y agoThese people don’t have object permanence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899
- shaunpud 2y agoLooks like a GTA map
- apwheele 2y agoI am not a fan of the kernel density estimators with a continuous color ramp (at least this map the KDE does not recalculate on zoom, that is pretty much worthless). Currently the UI on the left returns all empty images for me, https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/re068bj1vnaitsoh59x27/NoImage.PNG?rlkey=21jkcz70rtnp5f1y3d599ljwk&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/re068bj1vnaitsoh59x27/NoImage... I rather enjoy using either points directly (and for dense point maps use leaflet's cluster markers), or actual outlined areas (e.g. using DBSCAN). For a few examples I have put together - Dallas crime dashboard (using wasm + python), https://crimede-coder.com/graphs/Dallas_Dashboard https://crimede-coder.com/graphs/Dallas_Dashboard - Durham NC hotspots (leaflet), https://crimede-coder.com/graphs/DurhamHotspots https://crimede-coder.com/graphs/DurhamHotspots
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- high_pathetic 2y agoLooking forward to my business trip to Portland in a few weeks... The place where I am going is right in the middle of the big red blob, when the "Assault" is selected. Is it really that bad?
- shawnozzy 2y agoThis is really cool. I see your using open street map, is that heat map you're using open source, or something you've built internally?