We met with the Boston City Councilor for District 7, Tania Anderson, who was excited to talk with us about the problems her district — which includes parts of Roxbury, Fenway, and the South End — is facing. Specifically, the Councilor mentioned drop-out rates, foster care rates, police presence, food deserts, heat islands and homeownership disparities between the black and brown residents of Roxbury and residents of other neighborhoods.
Based on the data we received from the Councilor’s office and her questions about the differences in Roxbury’s funding compared to other neighborhoods in Boston, we wanted to explore the relationship between crime rates, types of crime, and funding in the different neighborhoods. After exploring the web for some databases that could help our exploration of Roxbury’s makeup and funding, we settled upon the crime database.
We have a few sources for data. One came from Councilor Anderson, who gave us Boston’s 2023 city plan for projects that are in progress, planned for the future, or already completed. This plan includes the department of government that is completing the project, the project’s name, the aim of the project, the status of it, what neighborhood it is in, a secondary neighborhood (if it spans multiple), the city district, and then many different categories that include funding details. Department, project name, aim, neighborhood, and district are all categorical variables. The project status is ordinal, and the funding details are all numerical variables.
The other data sources come from the city’s public database, and it is focused on calls placed to police over the past eight years. The categories are incident number, offense code, the group of offense code, the description of the offense, the police district it happens in, the reporting area, if there were shots fired, when it happens, and what the location is (street, latitude/longitude). Incident number, offense code/description, district, reporting area, and the location are all categorical, while the date is ordinal, and the shooting numbers are numerical.
There was some extensive cleaning that had to go into the police reports data, which included taking nine offenses and using those for our visualization, as there were simply too many codes to show all of them. That was done in Excel, and we pulled together seven datasets from 2015-2021 to get those numbers. We had to calculate year-to-year change by percentage as well in that dataset.
For the Boston choropleth map, there were a few changes we had to make to our city plan in order to make it work with the neighborhood shapefile we found. First, if we wanted to brush and link between the two, we needed to merge the dataframes on neighborhood, but that proved to be tricky as some neighborhoods were named differently on the map and in the city plan. We switched some of the names of the neighborhoods in the city plan to better correlate with the map and get a good product from it.
| Index | Domain Task | Analytic Task | Search Task | Analyze Task |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Of Boston neighborhoods, which are privy to high-level funding? | Overview | Browse | Present |
| 2 | What is the correlation between types of crime calls and neighborhood? | Overview | Locate | Present |
| 3 | What is the correlation between types of crime calls and neighborhood? | Overview | Locate | Present |
There were a few key findings that surfaced from our initial data inquiry.
When we opened the first dataset with the city plan, we were immediately drawn to the number of projects and their funding based on the district and neighborhood. This was one of the key points that Councilor Anderson stressed she wanted to see, so that was where we started. What we found was that, among neighborhoods in her district, the South End took up a large portion of the budget from District 7.
When we looked at the neighborhoods as a whole and not just the parts in the district, we found that Fenway had an even larger budget than the South End.
Then we looked at the city plan’s section on project progress and saw that a majority of the projects in Roxbury are actually under construction or in design. What does that mean? To be honest, we’re not sure. We don’t know if production is being delayed or the time frame that these projects will be finished by. But what we can see is that the neighborhood has five projects that are brand new and three that haven’t been scheduled yet. These, along with the eight that are in design and one that is still being studied for, make up more than half of the 32 projects that we had in our spreadsheet for Roxbury.
After that, we moved to the crime data. What we discovered is that the shoplifting offenses called to police in Fenway are much higher than any other offense in any district. When focusing closely on Roxbury, we saw that there’s a high number of larceny - theft from motor vehicle charges as well as aggravated assault calls made to police.
We considered ways to capture the welfare of a given area, especially relating to peace of mind, in a few ways. Much like in the third visualization soon to follow, the best means of doing this was through the crime data available to us and the public from Boston Police's incident log. With a surplus of information, we compiled like calls, such as different types of theft, into broad categories like larceny or assault. Then, in order to better compare these, it was best to demonstrate both the magnitude of the calls in relation to the City of Boston and to other incidents in specific areas. Therefore, we created three different treemaps distinguished by color of reported incidents throughout 2023 in Fenway, Roxbury and Downtown, with each square's size determined by the percentage of calls in-area attributed to one of the top-ten categories, and added an additional channel of color-intensity to demonstrate global differences by area.
We wanted to compare the total funding in 2021 across neighborhoods in Boston without limiting comparisons to just District 7. To do so we employed a choropleth map that enables users to see where each neighborhood is located relative to other neighborhoods in Boston. We applied details-on-demand interactive feature that allows the user to select one or more neighborhoods and see their total funding compared to other neighborhoods in the corresponding bar chart. This design was to emphasize the drastic difference in funding of different neighborhoods, and also provides interesting insight into the rough area/size of each neighborhood relative to its funding. After receiving feedback, we re-sized each chart so that they can appear next to each other which is easier for user viewing. Additionally, we changed the coloring so that the color of the neighborhood corresponds to the total funding it receives.
For the bar chart and grouped line chart, we wanted to look at the change in crime rates over time and how they differed from year to year. The best way to do this is to use a line chart, so we gathered data from 2015-2021 and plotted it for the top nine different offenses. If we used the entire dataset with each offense, we’d run into the problem of having far too many lines on the chart, so we cut it down. Then after plotting the line chart, we used a grouped bar chart to show the year-to-year percentage change based on a selection interval on the line chart. After some feedback, we tweaked a few things such as the size of the graphs and setting hard limits for the y-axis on the waterfall chart before finishing up the visualization.
Illegal Activity Reported in Roxbury, Fenway & Downtown
This treemap to illustrates the most prolific offense groups in Roxbury, Fenway and Downtown. Color was our encoding of choice, and we wanted to use the area as a channel to show the difference in crime types in the area.
Public Funding by Neighborhood in Boston
The choropleth map presents information about funding based on neighborhood differences. Boston is such a recognizable city, so showing the outline would make it easy for users to identify neighborhoods and the details-on-demand feature allows users to easily compare the differences in fundings.
Calls to Police in Roxbury by Crime Over Time
The line chart connected to the waterfall map shows the change in percentage of different offense groups from 2015 to 2021. We chose to encode color to show the change over time in different calls to the police department in Roxbury.
There were several strong takeaways from our visualizations. First, Roxbury’s most numerous criminal incident regarded suspicious behavior at 1691 calls. While Fenway and Downtown’s most prolific offense group is assault, but the total number of calls were less than 790 each. Second, it is evident that Roxbury receives the second most amount of funding of the District 7 neighborhoods after Fenway, at $158,448,299. Lastly, between the years of 2015 and 2021 we notice that the number of police calls concerning aggravated assault, homicide, robbery, and larceny has either stayed roughly the same or slighlty decreased. However, auto theft, residential burglary, missing persons, property lost, and harrassment calls have increased over the years. Based on the visualizations created we determined that the data is not as compelling as the Councilor initially assumed. It does not clearly and unwaveringly illustrate that Roxbury’s funding is related to police presence or vice versa. We acknowledge this outcome is not as coercive in displaying Roxbury’s disparity compared to other neighborhoods as desired, however this is unavoidable as we do not want to misrepresent data for the sake of the story.