Crime Visualization of San Francisco
padmapper.com
padmapper.com
There are probably other reasons too. E.g. that the hills are fancier neighborhoods.
But her explanation makes sense. If you're walking around looking for someone to rob, why walk up steep hills?
from wikipedia:
"Bayview-Hunters Point is predominantly African-American. The neighborhood has a population of 20,322 and is roughly 60% African-American, the highest concentration of that ethnic group in San Francisco."
The article on the community is quite lengthy and interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayview-Hunters_Point,_San_Fran...
I've never lived in San Francisco and don't know whether this community has a bad rep. because it's mostly black or if it really is as crime-ridden as its reputation.
I think we can all agree that this kind of data analysis is really important though, to understand where we live and shape public policy.
That and the gentrification resulting from UCSF's push into the area...
If you're walking around outside all day, and have no particular place to go, and are possibly pushing around a shopping cart full of stuff, it makes sense that you would tend to gravitate to areas with lower potential energy.
I believe Lisbon has a very low crime rate (for european standards) and my theory for more crime happening on the higher streets is pretty simple: on the bottom the streets are really big and there's lot of space while the streets on the top of the hills are really small so easier to be seen by the police when you're doing something evil.
I like thinking about these kind of relations though!
If everyone had cars, or public transit, you would probably see better property values on hills, like you do in SF.
I had two theories: leaving Golden Gate Park, you end up on Frederick street; going north gets you to Haight St which is a wonderful place to panhandle, going south gets you nowhere. The other theory is that it would have gone further south (maybe a few more blocks to Parnassus), but the Cole/Carl intersection was nice enough, and full of enough families, to push people south the second they get off of the N-Judah.
Since the hillside is forested, we get plenty of traffic from wildlife, but I can only think of maybe once or twice that any homeless person has dared ventured through to collect cans. Despite this I'm told that there WAS a burglary, but it must have been in the 70s, because following that the management put bars over the first floor windows, which have existed for my entire lifetime.
Also, preferably decent-looking prostitutes, not any of those skeezy ones you see outside the 16th street BART.
Yeah, I think this needs a drugs checkbox selector widget, just like padmapper itself.
I wonder what impact an intense cleaning would have on the crime rate there. And enforcement of simple things like public urination laws. And maybe some decent bathrooms.
I recall the kind of things New York did to restore a sense of order. Malcolm Gladwell talked about them in the Tipping Point. Surely similar measures would improve the crime situation in SF.
My prediction: sometime in the next 30 years the tech industry will have drifted elsewhere, and San Franscisco will be the new Detroit. Right now it's a mixture of the sublime and the awful, but the sublime can always pack up and move to Portland/Austin/Seattle.
But you're right. People in San Francisco don't seem to value public order enough to take the actions required to establish it.
It was on Geary, and a bit of a dive. First thing that surprised me was when I got into the taxi at the airport and the driver asked "Do you really want to go there?".
Next sign that things were not too good was when the chap at reception said - "Do not walk along Geary to get to Union square, walk two blocks up the hill, along and back down to Union square.
Of course, late one night I decided to walk directly back, after all how can it be (feeling reasonably safe going out in Glasgow - which is practically a war zone late at night). I only did this once - getting a taxi back after that!
Turns out the hotel I was staying in is right in the orange zone there.
The big surprise for me was how dirty downtown San Francisco was compared to LA. I'd never seen someone actually take a dump in the middle of a city sidewalk, or piss a level down into a train station before SF, and I haven't seen it since. My Full House illusions were well and truly shattered.
I learned the lesson and booked my own hotel the nice time I visited - stayed somewhere very nice right next to Union Square. :-)
It amuses me to imagine the mayor's desk with a selection of these maps, plus a little R/C/I readout.
I doubt there's an objectively right answer as to how to best normalize this - I think it just matters that it be understood by the user what it means. There are a number of ways to normalize it depending on what you care about.
However even if it can't be made into a usable product it'd be very interesting to see.
Transit lines are something that should go on PadMapper at some point. I hope Google opens up their transit layer sooner rather than later.
which separates out crime by types. You can clearly see patterns such as GTA's (car theft) along major streets in Hollywood.
I believe the data is correct, but I'm not sure what the SF police's data policies are. There could be some withholding, etc. The data comes from http://sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org/.
Bayview is higher crime, and shows moderate numbers on most of those maps (for violent crime). Murder isn't on that map. For gun-related crime, it is the top place in San Francisco, which is why the SFPD deployed the "ShotSpotter" system there -- basically a microphone array which can localize gunshots and notify the police.
EDIT: There's a crime density cutoff below which areas are blank. Within the bounds of SF, blank means very low crime density.