So someone nabbed your bike from your apartment building and you need to file a police report. You might think that you should just head on down to the closest precinct house and fill out a police report. But in 28% of the city, you would be wrong. That’s because your closest precinct house is not necessarily the precinct that patrols your neighborhood. I’ve created the map below that shows which parts of New York City are not covered by their closest precinct houses in red. Current precinct boundaries are in black. The boundaries in white would make each part of the city patrolled by its closest precinct house. Clicking on any part of the map will tell you which precinct covers that area and which one is closer.

Analyzing the data shows that Manhattan has the lowest percentage of closest coverage- less than two thirds of the island is covered by the closest precinct house.



I was surprised to learn that there were thirteen precincts where more than half the area they cover is closer to other precinct houses than their own.

For example, more than half of the 42nd precinct in the Bronx is closer to the 48th precinct house than it is to the 42nd precinct house. (The 48th precinct has carved out a few blocks just to include its precinct house).

The 108th precinct in Brooklyn, where only 31.4% of the land is closest to its own precinct house, includes an area that has parts closest to six other precinct houses: those of the 83rd, 94th, 104th, 110th, 114th and 115th.

Precinct houses like the 70th have been drawn into a specific precinct with some creative border drawing. As you can see, in this part of Brooklyn, its rare for a precinct house to be in the center of its district.

Of course, there are often good reasons for precinct boundaries to be drawn the way they are: traffic flow, land availability, waterways, roadways, population density, etc. Still, I was surprised to learn just how much of New York City is patrolled by a precinct house that is not closest.

Which brings us to the big question… do areas in red have more crime per capita than areas in blue on the map? My quick analysis showed that there was not a meaningful difference. I’d imagine that officers are rarely responding from the precinct house itself.

So then why does this matter? One hypothesis might be that a centrally located precinct house could help strengthen relationships between the police and the communities they serve. The community events that precinct houses sometimes hold (haunted house anyone?) might draw a broader neighborhood audience. Not to mention the fact that a more centrally located precinct is one that a neighborhood resident is more likely to walk by and internalize. In an era where community policing is increasingly discussed, there always room to make our city just a bit “closer” to our police.



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-Precinct Boundaries found here.

-Bad Precinct Boundaries provided by City were repaired here. (Thanks to Chris Whong for suggesting.)

-Precinct Locations and crime analysis from incident level data.

-Analysis done in QGIS, using Voronoi Polygons

-Dynamic map made in Cartodb