Temporal Crime Histograms

Portland, Oregon

2007 - 2013

Like a lot of Portlanders, I am a transplant. Having relocated here from a city with considerably more crime, the relative safety of Portland has been a continuing curiosity.

Finding simple statistics on the number of crimes per person is easily found with a quick Wolfram Alpha query. Further investigation revealed comprehensive yearly datasets of 'Crime Incidents' provided by the City of Portland Police, and aggregated on CivicApps.org. This information is probably most effectively used by the Crime Mapper website, which allows you to enter an address and get information on crimes for a half mile radius.

Where a crime occurs is a very important piece of information, but knowing when a crime occurs is at least equally important. Am I less likely to be mugged at 9am or 9pm? What about Wednesday versus Saturday? What day of the week is most popular for aggravated assault? Has this changed from year to year? Those answers are hard to discern without some investigation.

To find the answers to those questions I parsed the data using Processing, and visualized it using D3.js.



Note: Click (or tap) on the histogram to change the year.