Visualizing Chicago Crime Landscape
Challenge
Chicago has a reputation for being one of the most violent cities in America. While this perception is skewed–the homicide rate per 100,000 residents in the Windy City is much lower than in cities like New Orleans, Detroit or St. Louis–the number of shooting incidents in Chicago is still staggering. An average of 12 people is shot every single day (2016). The City of Chicago provides detailed data on crimes committed, so we decided to take on the challenge of visualizing over 6 million records from the last decade and a half.
Solution
This visualization was one of the favorites in the 2015 Tableau IronViz feeder contest. The biggest task was handling the huge number of records imported from the City of Chicago data portal. We created a comprehensive set of dashboards providing insight into geographic distribution of crime incidents in the city, as well as an analysis of seasonality of crimes, and day of week/hour patterns. We also looked at the long-term trends in crime occurrence and the impact of violent crime on property prices in the city. We went with a striking design of red on a black background to emphasize the gravity of the topic.