The Contours of Crime

The R Tutorial for Spatial Statistics blog has a series of interesting maps visualizing London crime data. The blog post is a great tutorial on mapping data using R.

The maps include a choropleth map showing the number of crimes in each London borough, a heat map of crime in London and a contour map of crime in London. It is fascinating how these different map visualization techniques reveal different aspects about the nature of crime in the UK capital.

The heat map seems to suggest that crime is closely related to residential population. The areas with the lowest levels of crime are the financial districts of the City of London and Canary Wharf. The other areas of low crime in London seem to be other pockets of low residential density, such as the big London parks.


The contour map of crime appears to identify distinct problem areas of crime centered around Shoreditch High Street, Camden Town and the area of the West End around Leicester Square. It may not be a coincidence that these three areas are popular centers of night-life entertainment. It just might be that a large number of intoxicated young people leads to higher levels of crime.

Via: Visualoop


Mapbox recently used animated contour lines to visualize crime in Chicago from 2001-2015. The Mapbox map is a neat demonstration of the capabilities of Turf.js.

Chicago Crime Data with Turf provides a moving timeline of crime in Chicago over more than a decade. The graph beneath the map shows how Chicago crime during this period has declined. One neat feature of the map is that you can select a date-range on the timeline to loop through the selected time period in the map animation.