There is a lot of talk about NYC being a global leader in Open Data. But when it comes to police data, New York City lags well behind its peers in transparency. Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Denver and Boston all have released comprehensive incident level crime data, allowing residents to understand where and when many types of individual crimes happen.

Up until very recently, the NYPD and the de Blasio administration has kept all of that data to themselves. But there is evidence that the City is starting to take transparency just a bit more seriously. A few months ago, we saw our first signs of this- the release of nine months of historical crime data. At the time, I pointed out that although this was a small step forward, we lacked the longer data history that other cities had. But just a few weeks ago, the City quietly turned that nine months of data into ten years of history. No fanfare, no press release, just crime data.

For Open Data advocates here in NYC, this is a really big deal. And eventually it will be a big deal for all New Yorkers- once we get the appropriate tools in people’s hands and novel insights start to come forward. Because for the first time, we can see what block each crime happens, as opposed to what precinct.

So given this latest release, why is New York City still behind other cities on police data transparency? Well, to date, New York refuses to release data on crimes beyond the “Major Seven” felonies. And its the crime data currently being withheld by the City that is exactly the data that is most controversial in a “broken windows” oriented police department. We lack visibility on so many of the quality of life crimes It’s disappointing that even with a progressive Mayor, there is no sign of any movement in that data.

Fortunately, the missing data does not preclude us from doing something with what we have so far, and I plan to do just that in a series of posts over the next month or so.

My first finding? Well, NYC is really safe. I know, I know. We always hear that. But when I heard recently that our most dangerous neighborhoods were safer than some cities in the US, I had to find out if that was true.

To do so, I took nine years of murder data from the FBI and calculated the average homicide rate (annual # of homicides per 100K residents) for cities in the US with populations above 250,000. There were 72 such cities in the FBI data.

The 20 cities with the highest murder rates are shown below:

Despite its size, New York comes in in 54th place in this metric.

I did the same calculation (annual Murders/100K residents) for NYC’s neighborhoods from 2006-2015- something which was not possible before this data release.

The neighborhood with the highest murder rate turns out to be Ocean Hill, followed by neighboring Brownsville. Though the murder rate in Ocean Hill is about five times higher than NYC’s overall rate, it is still lower than the entire cities of New Orleans, Detroit, St Louis, Baltimore and Newark! Of course there are parts of each of these cities that are safer than Ocean Hill, and I am comparing neighborhoods with entire cities. But still, I found this to shed a new light on just how safe New York City really is. By comparing neighborhoods to Cities, I am essentially taking the highest murder rate in New York City, and showing how it compares to the average in those cities. It’s like saying the hottest day in City X is colder than the average day in City Y. I think this approach gives a much clearer impression of the seperation between the two cities than simply comparing the averages of both.

So what happens if we compare each neighborhood’s murder rate to one of these cities? I made a map that does just that. Each neighborhood in the map is labeled with the city on my list that has the closest murder rate above its own.

Notice that some of the higher crime parts of Brooklyn share crime rates with Newark, Oakland, Cleveland, Chicago and Sacaramento. Some higher crime areas in the Bronx share crime rates with Pittsburgh, Millwaukee and Houston. You may also notice a lot of comparisons to Honolulu in some of the more safe areas of the City. It turns out that Honolulu was the safest city in the data set, and so many low crime areas of the city end up getting compared to it.

A full list of NYC neighborhoods, their rankings, and their comparable city is below:

In the end, these comparisons gave me a new way to contextualize some aspects of crime in NYC’s neighborhoods. They also gave me a new reason to visit Honolulu - besides the weather.

FBI data found in Table 8 of each year here.

NYC Crime data found on Open Data Portal here.

Neighborhood (NTA) Shape files NTA found here.

Neighborhood (NTA) populations found here

Maps created in QGIS, exported to Cartodb.