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Comment by SafemapTecnolgs | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for checking out the site and for the feedback. It's definitely something we're looking into.

It's kind of an interesting question though because it somewhat varies by crime category. Take car break ins, for instance - this is more of a constant factor than a population density scalar because the number of parking spots is generally fixed on a per-block basis rather than scaling with population density.

I think we might try to give users the option of dividing by population density but allow them to toggle this on/off.

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Parking turnover probably scales with population density. One of the reasons parking is more expensive in big cities is to encourage people to move their cars sooner. Smaller cities will have more cars that never move, where larger ones will have fewer.

If it's about movement, then population density might not be the best factor either. You might need some other way to see the number of humans moving through a given area. Stuff like office buildings have higher populations during office hours, but wouldn't be caught in "population" metrics.

As a toggle would be useful because depending on how you're using the map you might want to see per capita or absolute numbers. (Personally I think it's more useful per capita.)

Yeah, I think having it as an option is the way to go. Though I’d personally have it default to per-capita, as I do think that correlates closer with actual risk. To illustrate with an extreme example, an area with 10 burglaries per 100 people is clearly a way higher burglary risk place to live than an area with 20 burglaries per 10,000 people.

Car break ins still depend on thievs that scale at some rate in the population. There’s finite time to break into a car.

The number of parking spots may be static, but the number of potential thieves scales with population density.

Does it really? Some classes of crime have been narrowed down to the same 50 individuals. You can't model car break-ins as everybody in the area rolling the dice on getting a taste for breaking glass and grabbing things.

it scales with a factor of less than 1.0 but yes it scales. For instance the number of thieves could be given by the ratio .001 * population.

yes, And this is why it's so frustrating the police don't just setup a few honeypots and catch those 50 people. Sooooooo many citizens would be helped, neighborhoods too, ...

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