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Joe Leider

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The seasonality of Chicago crime

April 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment

I wrote a couple posts on Chicago crime: 13 data narratives and Chicago crime by hour. But the data are so interesting that I wanted to dig deeper into the seasonality of Chicago crime. Before I was using trendlines to show this, but by switching to a color-box like below, we can more easily compare the difference in seasonality among a lot of different types of crimes.

For example, in the graph below we see that gambling, public indecency, ‘other’ narcotics crimes and homicides are more skewed towards the summer. Stalking & narcotics don’t show much seasonality at all. Obscenity seems like a winter crime.

Some of this makes sense: I wouldn’t want to publicly expose myself in a Chicago winter, for instance. But why would the distribution of narcotics be different than ‘other’ narcotics? In any case, this simple color-coded table is great for packing a lot of easily digestible information into a small space.

1-seasonality

Another interesting view is distribution by day of week. We see that intimidation happens mainly on weekdays (perhaps this is mainly a workplace crime?). The same is true of stalking, deceptive practice, obscenity, burglary and a host of other crimes. Other crimes happen more on the weekend, like arson and interfering with a public officer. Homicide and criminal sexual assaults certainly skewed towards weekends. Interestingly, 20% of kidnappings happen on a Friday (compared to about 13%-14% on any other day).

2-dow

What about arrest rates by day of week? Is there any particular day where, if you commit a crime, you’re more likely to get busted? Don’t commit obscenity on Sunday. But also don’t murder anyone on a Tuesday (55% arrest rate). If you really need to kill someone, do it on a Sunday when you only have a 48% chance of being arrested.

3-arrest rate

Despite my jesting, this data is very heavy and still quite fascinating. Of course if anyone has more suggestions for better visualizing this data, please comment below.

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