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Show HN: Crime Doesn't Climb in San Francisco
- bluedino 13y agoHow about showing it overlaid with a topographical map?
- gwintrob 13y agoYes, that would be a nice visualization. http://cartodb.com/ http://cartodb.com/ is a pretty powerful tool for these kinds of maps.
- idupree 13y agoTopOSM is Open Data (OpenStreetMap data) and is my go-to place for finding out where hills are. http://www.toposm.com/ http://www.toposm.com/ (For looking at hills in cities, click the "+" on the right to get a menu where you can toggle streets ("Map Features") on and off.)
- bdon 13y agoInteresting. I suspect elevation is highly correlated with land value, so perhaps that is the hidden factor here? I'd like to see this applied to other hilly cities. Great work!
- codezero 13y agoWhat about weighted by population density?
- gwintrob 13y agoGreat point. There are a lot of interesting ways to analyze this data (e.g. population, public transportation, home prices, etc.)
- grandalf 13y agoMore accurately, the MUNI doesn't climb. In the nicer areas there is no light rail service, only a few filthy buses.
- xxpor 13y agoAre you implying that public transportation causes crime?
- cshenoy 13y agoPerhaps it facilitates crime (petty theft, etc) especially considering the density of people in areas where public transportation is available.
- ar7hur 13y agoI think grandalf is implying that public transportation tends to be an attractor to some people who are more likely to commit street crimes. Notice the street. I'd say that financial crime is more likely to be done by Uber riders than bus riders in SF!
- mseebach 13y agoFinancial crime is typically committed in offices in the financial districts of cities, not at the home addresses of the offenders. These districts are typically very well connected by public transport.
- jlgreco 13y agoWho doesn't work from home on occasion? Anyway, I wager that much insider trading is done from home rather than in the office. It is safer that way.
- ZanyProgrammer 13y agoThis is only SFPD data-I'm pretty sure various federal agencies investigate a lot of the white collar crime in the Fi Di
- geebee 13y agoThis is interesting, but on my browser, the map cuts out much of the southern section of SF. Is it included in the numbers? This area may present a particularly interesting section to study elevation changes. http://wikitravel.org/en/San_Francisco/Southeast http://wikitravel.org/en/San_Francisco/Southeast
- ar7hur 13y agoVery interesting. Other comments have listed possible factors like population density, public transportation (MUNI). I'd love to see the correlation with: - the derivative of elevation (i.e. the slope) - the street lightning
- smtddr 13y agoI'd like a map overlay of median(not average! that means nothing in SF!!!) income of those areas. Something tells me higher elevation = way more expensive, especially here in SF. I don't think the common thief is wandering about on billionaire-row[1]. I think this has more to do with wealth than land-elevation itself. http://www.sfcityguides.org/desc.html?tour=34 http://www.sfcityguides.org/desc.html?tour=34
- ojbyrne 13y agoAFAIK, that's traditionally the way its been in SF. Altitude correlates with wealth.
- cgtyoder 13y agoPotrero Hill might be the exception.
- geebee 13y agoIt happens in the southern sections of the city too (which are not included on the map). Ingleside Terrace is considerably more expensive than the OMI (ocean view, merced heights, ingleside). Similarly, Mission Terrace, which not a posh neighborhood, is nonetheless a bit more expensive than the Excelsior, which is elevated ground toward McLaren Park.
- ojbyrne 13y agoHaving lived in Potrero, I've noticed that the houses get significantly ritzier towards the top. But the side facing away from the city is a pretty steep downgrade.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- xiaoma 13y agoI lived in a crappy $500/month place in Chinatown for a year, ending this spring. It was the lowest rent building I've ever heard of in SF and most my neighbors were elderly immigrants with limited English (or even Mandarin!) language skills. It was way safer than any of the three directions that went down hill (i.e. towards Market, towards the Embarcadero or towards fisherman's wharf). There was also a notable absence of beggars. I think there really is something to it just being too much of a PITA to hike up all those hills.
- snake_plissken 13y agoCorrelate with population density? Also, the time of day?
- Kurtz79 13y agoI guess street crimes are more frequent in areas where there is an higher concentration of people/shops/bars etc. I can't say I see a definite correlation with altitude: areas that are more secluded from the main SF buzz like the Marina and the west coast show very little crime, and they are basically at sea level.
- Groxx 13y agoHmm... I don't know if equal-area tells you much. As you go higher, you also sometimes/often get much rougher terrain. Population density might be more useful?
- anateus 13y agoThis is a fun exploration, but there are just so many plausible additional factors, from population density, to SFPD's selective enforcement, to many others that can be at least as significant if not more so than this one. This is not meant to be an exhaustive causal analysis. You try to control for land mass, but don't really mention anything else that might indicate elevation to be a less significant factor and I think that does a great disservice to what otherwise is an interesting exercise.
- skwirl 13y agoI don't think the article is trying to claim that elevation magically has a causal impact on crime rates. It just shows that there is a correlation and claims nothing more. The point is that there IS some underlying root cause (or an extreme coincidence) and that is an interesting point in and of itself.
- mscarborough 13y ago"A great disservice"? Lighten up, this was a hackathon project, not a doctoral thesis. And the code is there for anyone to build upon using other factors.
- geebee 13y agoI agree. This is a good example of a small project that was worth getting out there. The code is posted, so if it's triggering some ideas, that's kind of the point - by all means, run with it!
- xycodex 13y agoWhat about adjusting for the greater probability that a given area is residential the higher the elevation? Perhaps more crime occurs outside residential areas. Just speculating here.
- pa5tabear 13y agoIt it all JavaScript I'm looking at? (I'm only ~halfway through the JS course on CodeCademy and don't know much else programming related).
- flixic 13y agoYes, this is all JavaScript.
- mturmon 13y agoThere are a lot of confounding variables here, and others have mentioned a few. One I have not seen is "proximity to major arterials". Sometimes crime concentrates around major streets and parking lots where cars can be stolen or broken into. (The OP mentions "grand theft from locked auto" as being ~10% of crimes, for example.) Another common crime, shoplifting and petty thefts, occurs around strips of shops, urban malls, transit stations, or bus stops. These crimes really don't have to do with altitude, and they are common enough to really affect results. The reason I know this is by inspecting the LAPD compstat maps, which are superior, in many ways, to the linked one. One place to see them is: http://www.crimemapping.com/map/region/LAPDHollywoodArea http://www.crimemapping.com/map/region/LAPDHollywoodArea This is Hollywood. You can notice the concentration of crimes along Hollywood Blvd, or the other major east-west streets. (The zoom tool is on the right, and it may be good to increase the time span to a month.) Inspecting the causes show they are often thefts from vehicles, etc., as mentioned above.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoThis is invalid. The numbers calculated are counts of crime incidents, not crime rates. A km^2 block with ten times the population density will have ten times the number of crimes; this doesn't mean it is ten times more dangerous!
- rsync 13y agoIf you scroll down you'll see they adjust for that in a followup graph ...
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoNo, they normalize by land area (km^2).
- msellout 13y agoCrime per km^2 is just as valid as crime per person.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoIt's valid if you're a square kilometer of dirt and you're afraid of being mugged on.
- derefr 13y agoOr, I suppose, if you're trying to decide which square kilometer of dirt to build apartment complexes on based on projected property value trends (where crime is always a large factor.) These tend to be the people who pay for this sort of data (and thus incentivize its collection), which is why it's put in their terms.
- cbr 13y agoIf I want to know the chances of someone breaking into my apartment I want the data per-apartment. If I want to know the same for cars I want the data per-car. If I want to know my chance of getting shot I want the data per-person. Overall crimes per person approximates what we care about much better than crimes per unit area.
- herf 13y agoCrime likes a way to escape. Going higher up might just give you fewer ways to get away.
- rsync 13y agoCan we see the exact same study, but with SEC indictments and tax fraud/evasion, etc. ? I'll bet that "climbs" ...
- SkyAtWork 13y agoProbably for the perpetrators, probably not for the companies involved (which are likely to have the same set of Delaware and/or Cayman mailing addresses) :-P But sure, I would expect that white collar crime is unsurprisingly correlated. Maybe not though - boiler room style phone banks of investor fraudsters are a stereotype for a reason, and those aren't necessarily the high rent end of town.
- kennywinker 13y agoAre you counting the crime as happening at the place of business, or at the home of the perp? It'd be hard to quantify, as WHERE a white collar crime happens is not particularly material. You can cook the books at home or at work.
- natural219 13y agoskwirl has the correct answer here, but it is buried in a sub-comment: "I don't think the article is trying to claim that elevation magically has a causal impact on crime rates. It just shows that there is a correlation and claims nothing more. The point is that there IS some underlying root cause (or an extreme coincidence) and that is an interesting point in and of itself." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6355511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6355511
- lowglow 13y agoWe were just noting the same about poverty in San Francisco.
- brown9-2 13y agoData that reports per-person activity needs to control for population density in each section, otherwise it just becomes a population map. http://xkcd.com/1138/ http://xkcd.com/1138/
- jcampbell1 13y agoI suppose the the analysis would be better if it used Census Block Groups for the grid. That it could better account for population density. Unfortunately extracting CBG data is extremely painful. CBG data would also be slightly problematic in that it is residence based, thus a place like NYC's Time Square may show high crime rates per "resident", but is extremely safe. Does anyone know where you can get a simplified CBG data dump? All you would need are boundaries and population.
- spenrose 13y agoPete Warden would like you to use public APIs: http://petewarden.com/2013/09/09/why-you-should-stop-pirating-googles-geo-apis/ http://petewarden.com/2013/09/09/why-you-should-stop-piratin... . Also, the association of low ground with poverty is old. Toni Morrison riffed on it in Sula: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sula_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sula_(novel)
- kennywinker 13y agoVery good article! The Data Science Toolkit he pumps as an alternative to pirating google's APIs looks awesome, and deserves a direct link: http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org
- robotcookies 13y agoThrowaway makes a very valid point that crime per areas isn't very useful. But even beyond that the map is also confusing because for the lower elevations it shows both lower areas AND higher area crime incidents. Then as it goes higher, it just shows the higher ones. In other words, it should really show an outer ring for the lowest elevation (since that's where the lower areas are) and then a smaller ring, etc. Only the highest areas would not have a hole in the center (most likely). Think of elevation maps and how you would select out one range of elevation at a time - you'd end up with donut like rings. You wouldn't mark an area as 500 feet and show all the rings for 500 feet and up. Doing this makes it seem like there are far more crimes than actual for the lower levels.
- kata1yst 13y agotl;dr Everyone in San Francisco, buy ladders.
- coherentpony 13y agoThe first thing on that page is a GIF. There is no explanation. It is not clear what the GIF is meant to be portraying. I even went on to read the first two paragraphs, which also didn't explain what the GIF was supposed to be illustrating. After that I closed the page.
- vtcraghead 13y agoYou want population and crime rate included in the analysis? Fine. http://geosprocket.blogspot.com/2013/09/crime-doesnt-insert-variable.html http://geosprocket.blogspot.com/2013/09/crime-doesnt-insert-...