Information System

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Visualizing Crime in Philadelphia

Figure 1 – The city of Philadelphia divided into police districts

Abstract - Philadelphia has consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous cities in the United

States. The City of Brotherly Love is plagued by violent crime and its distinction as the most

impoverished among America’s 10 largest cities. There are a number of factors that contribute to

these issues. This research aims to visualize the breadth and depth of crime in Philadelphia in

order to gain a better understanding of what specific types of crimes occur in the city and where.

1. Introduction

The crime rate across the United States as a

whole has fallen significantly over the past

20 years. The Federal Bureau of

Investigations (FBI) releases an annual

report titled Crime in the United States

(CIUS). This report shows that

Philadelphia’s crime rate has fortunately

followed that same pattern as well.

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime

Reporting (UCR), the number of violent

crimes reported to the Philadelphia Police

Department dropped from a peak of 23,031

in 1999 to 15,925 in 2014 (the most recent

year available) [1]. The department also

highlights crime statistics in their own UCR.

2016 saw the fewest number of violent

crimes since 1979, fewest property crimes

since 1971 and the fewest number of

robberies since 1969 [2]. Nonetheless, the

numbers do not tell the full story of what is

happening in the city.

The specific types of crimes that are

committed, as well as where in the city they

occur exactly, provide more meaningful

grounds for visualizing the numbers behind

the data. The crime rate is a common

misperception amongst citizens of the

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United States. Even though data shows that

crime has fallen significantly in recent

times, the majority of people, including

prominent politicians, actually believe that

crime has gotten worse [3]. The gap that

exists between the reality of people’s safety

with their oft misconstrued perception of

their safety was a major motivation behind

our research. We aim to visualize the data in

a way that provides a more clear and

complete picture of crime in Philadelphia

with a focus on gun violence.

We obtained all our data sets from Open

Data Philly, the City’s official open data

repository. The information included in

these data sets that we used in our analysis

includes crime incidents, shootings and

police districts. The data fields included

information such as the date of the crime,

location of the crime, specific type of crime

(with a description and code), the police

district the crime was committed in, among

other details of the crime.

Our expectation, like the majority of the

public, was that crime in Philadelphia has

been increasing in the past decade. We

anticipated our analysis to show that

increase. Additionally, we suspected that the

poorest city districts would have higher

crime rates than other parts of the city.

Lastly, we expected to find a large number

of gun violence across the city.

The paper is organized into five additional

sections. The next four sections will each

include one visualization that we produced.

Each visualization is broken down into the

data used to generate it, the results that are

shown and our interpretation of the results

obtained. We will conclude our findings in

the final section of our paper.

2. Visualization I – Crime in 2016

Figure 2 – Number of Incidents by Type in 2016

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2.1 Data

The data set used to produce this

visualization spans from the years 2006 to

2016. It includes every crime that was

reported to the Philadelphia Police

Department during that time. Other elements

of the crime data include the date and

location of the crime, the police district it

occurred in and a brief description of the

crime. This visualization includes data from

only 2016. The main data element that we

analyzed in this visualization was the

specific types of crime that were committed

during that year. The goal was to visualize

what are currently the most common threats

to public safety for Philadelphia residents.

2.2 Results

The first noteworthy result from this

visualization is that by far the most common

type of crime reported is categorized under

“all other offenses”. This means that these

crimes could not be categorized into any of

the other types of crimes. The top five

specific types of crimes are: narcotic/drug

law offenses, assaults, thefts,

vandalism/criminal mischief and recovered

stolen motor vehicle. The number of

occurrences of these top five crimes alone

total over 10,000 incidents.

2.3 Interpretations

The first crime type categorized as “all other

offenses” tells us a couple of different

things. The first is that these crimes were

random since they could not be categorized

as any of the other major types of crime

included in the list. Secondly, it tells us that

there were a large number of these kinds of

crimes, given how many there were. The

ambiguity that this categorization contains

makes it difficult to come up with any other

determinations related to its content.

The top five specific types of crimes listed

provides a much richer picture because of

how specific they each are. By analyzing

these categories, it is clear that Philadelphia

has a rampant drug problem. There were

over 3,000 drug offenses reported in 2016,

an average of about 8.5 incidents per day.

This is the reality that many Philadelphia

neighborhoods, such as those in North

Philadelphia, Fairhill and Kensington, face

on an everyday basis. Assault, theft and

vandalism/criminal mischief are also daily

occurrences in the city.

Interestingly, the City does not include

shootings in this data set as a specific type

of incident reported, although it does include

other crimes that involve guns such as

aggravated assault, robbery and homicide by

a criminal with a firearm. The reason is that

Open Data Philly actually has a separate

data set exclusively for shooting incidents,

which we explored and analyzed in

Visualization 3.

3. Visualization II – Historical View

of Crime in Top Five Districts

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Figure 3 – Top Five Districts All Crime, 2006-2017

3.1 Data

We produced this visualization using the

same data set as the first. The only

difference is that the main data element we

analyzed here was the total number of

crimes in each district by year, spanning

from 2006 through 2017. 2017 is not over

yet, so it is the only year that is not entirely

complete. There are 21 districts in

Philadelphia, but our goal here was to

visualize the five most dangerous ones and

put them into historical context over the past

decade.

3.2 Results

Districts 12, 15, 19, 24, and 25 rank as the

most dangerous areas of the city over this

time period. It is important to mention that

the data set only includes crimes that were

reported. Many crimes are not reported to

police for a variety of reasons such as the

lack of trust and cooperation with police

within the community. This should be taken

into consideration since the most crime-

ridden areas are often prone to

underreporting. This visualization shows

that the total number of crimes reported in

the top five districts has steadily decreased

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over the past decade. It dropped from a peak

of about 77,000 in 2006 to just under 60,000

in 2016. This is a 22% decline in crime over

the past decade.

This is the bigger picture, but by looking at

the numbers, it is also apparent that the total

number of crimes for all five districts have

not decreased every year. Years 2012 and

2014 actually saw an uptick in crime.

Additionally, none of the districts show a

steady yearly decrease. They all fluctuate.

The largest fluctuation appears to be with

District 25 where under 11,000 incidents

were reported in 2016 compared to over

18,000 in 2006.

3.3 Interpretations

Our findings contradict our initial

expectation that crime has gotten worse in

Philadelphia over the past 10 years. Even

though this visualization shows the steady

decrease in crime for only the top five

districts, further analysis of the dataset also

supports the fact that crime has been steadily

decreasing across the city as a whole. Due to

the fact that this data set does not include

shootings in its count of incidents, we

decided to analyze this specific incident in a

separate visualization due to its severity and

in order to compare it to overall crime in the

city.

4. Visualization III - Shootings

Figure 5 – Top Five Districts by Shootings,

2015-2017

4.1 Data

The dataset we used included information on

shootings reported in the city, spanning back

to 2015. We filtered on the top five districts

with the highest number of shootings

reported.

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4.2 Results

Districts 22, 24, 25, 35 and 39 reported

having the most number of shootings. The

total number of shootings in these five

districts actually increased from about 600

in 2015 to over 650 in 2016.

4.3 Interpretations

Districts 24 and 25 were on both the top five

districts for overall crime and specifically

for shootings. This indicates that these

districts are particularly troubled in regard to

their crime rate. This also means that there

appears to be no direct correlation between

overall crime and shootings, since the other

three districts included in this visualization

do not appear on the previous one. The

findings we analyzed here also indicate that

gun violence is remarkably high in the city

of Philadelphia. In 2016 alone, there were

over 1,300 shootings. These top five districts

accounted for more than half of those

incidents.

This is also representative of the deadly

trend of gun violence across the United

States and confirms our original suspicion

that Philadelphia is no different. Although

the steadily decreasing crime rate is

promising, gun violence remains a major

issue for Philadelphia residents.

5. Visualization IV – Crime over

Population

Figure 6 – Crime in Districts 24 & 25 with Population

5.1 Data

This visualization was produced using the

same data set as the first. Here we looked at

the count of crime incidents over the course

of 2016. Since 2017 is not over yet, we

believed looking at the last full year of data

would be the best. We only looked at the

Police Districts 24 & 25 since there were the

two which had the most crime and

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shootings. This data was overlaid over the

population by city block using the data set

built in to Tableau.

5.2 Results

The visualization showed there were not

many crimes committed in the middle, blue

section of the two districts. This blue

section indicates a higher population of

people live in that area. Crime incidents are

pretty spread out throughout the districts as

there are many smaller dots throughout the

visualization. While it is spread out, we can

see a concentration of incidents in the lower,

middle of the visualization. In this area,

there are multiple larger dots which

represent a greater number of crime

happened in that specific area.

5.3 Interpretations

In previous visualizations, we could see that

there is a numerous amount of crime which

takes place in Police Districts 24 & 25.

Here we can see the crime is not necessarily

concentrated in a specific area. There is one

area which has multiple location along the

street with multiple incidents. Kensington

Avenue is the street which multiple crime

occurs. This is backed up by news reports

of a lot of drugs and prostitution on this

street. [4]

6. Conclusion

Through visualizing crime data from

Philadelphia, we can see there is a log of

crime throughout the city. Most crime is

situated in the North Philadelphia area. This

area is within the Philadelphia Police

Department’s Districts 24 & 25. These two

districts are in the top five for both crime

overall and shootings. We were able to plot

all the crime data to see most crime is seen

in the area around Kensington Avenue.

News article support this data as well from

talking to people along Kensington Avenue

about drugs and prostitution in the area. The

data supports that this area is one of the

most crime filled area of Philadelphia.

Overall the crime is on a downward trend in

the city. Over the past few years the data

shows that crime and shootings are

decreasing in number of incidents.

While there was a lot of data contained in

the datasets from the Philadelphia Police

Department, there is room to improve the

dataset. The major issue with the data sets is

while the crime dataset has shootings, the

shooting dataset has additional columns.

These columns contain information specific

to shootings. These two datasets are

difficult to connect due to differences in data

and lack of a unique identifier similar in

each dataset. The major difference in the

data is with the crime codes. The crime

codes are more specific in the shooting

dataset then the complete crime dataset. An

additional issue is with the data is many

crimes categorized under “All Other

Offenses.” This type of crime was the

largest and without any way to understand

what these offences are creates difficulties in

analyzing the data. If these data issues were

fixed additional analysis can be completed

to get an improved picture of the crime in

Philadelphia.

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References:

1. Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 26 Jan. 2017,

www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/Local/RunCrimeJurisbyJuris.cfm.

2. Palmer, Chris. “Police: Philly Crime at Lowest Level in Decades.” Philly.com, 11 Jan. 2017,

www.philly.com/philly/news/20170112_Police__Philly_crime_at_lowest_level_in_decades.html

3. Gramlich, John. “5 Facts about Crime in the U.S.” Pew Research Center, 21 Feb. 2017,

www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/21/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/.

4. Deeney, Jeff. “Philadelphia's Kensington Avenue: Heroin, Prostitution, and No Police.” The

Daily Beast, The Daily Beast Company, 13 Aug. 2011, www.thedailybeast.com/philadelphias-

kensington-avenue-heroin-prostitution-and-no-police.

5. “Crime Incidents.” OpenDataPhilly, City of Philadelphia,

www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/crime-incidents.

6. “Police Districts.” OpenDataPhilly, City of Philadelphia,

www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/police-districts.

7. “Police Stations.” OpenDataPhilly, City of Philadelphia,

www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/police-stations.

8. “Shooting Victims.” OpenDataPhilly, City of Philadelphia,

www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/shooting-victims.