Monday, June 23, 2014

Crime on the New York Subway & in DC


The New York Daily News has mapped five years of crimes reported at New York subway stations. How Safe is your Subway? uses scaled circular markers to visualize the number of crimes committed at each stop on the MTA network. The map shows crime recorded over a five-year period, from July 2008 to June 2013. You can filter the map to visualize different types of crime on the New York subway system.

One of the biggest mistakes made by a lot of mapped data visualizations is to not normalize data by population (or in this case passenger numbers). The Daily News map doesn't make this mistake and gives you the option to view the number of crimes normalized by the number of trips made. For example, you would expect a busy station such as Times Square to have a proportionally higher number of recorded crimes than less busy stations simply because it has far more traffic.

Being able to view the rate of crimes per 100,000 trips allows you to compare the crime-rate at different stations based on the number of passengers.


CrimeDC is a new crime map for Washington DC created by the DC Police Union. The map allows you to view crimes committed in DC's neighborhoods by type of crime and by different time ranges over the last 12 months.

One neat feature of the map is that each neighborhood is shaded on the map to give an overview of whether crime has fallen or risen in the last month. Select a neighborhood on the map and you can view the percentage change in crime from the previous month and also view a chart of the frequency of crimes in the neighborhood over the last few years.

View more crime maps on Google Maps Mania

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