Does more crime happen during the late hours of the night or in the middle of the afternoon? Trulia Insights uses small multiples to look at crime by hour in major cities, or rather, when it is reported, according to SpotCrime. There appears to be a dip during the 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. hours for all crime types, across all cities. Well, except for Indianapolis, which seems to report incidents with rounded off hours.
It’s important to remember though that these are report times and not actually when incidents occurred, so maybe what we’re seeing are when most people are asleep and awake. For example, when I was a kid, my house was robbed while we were sleeping, but we didn’t notice the opened window and missing purses until we got up. So maybe a better title would be “when police departments should have more staff working.”
In any case, don’t go walking around waving your Benjamins in the air at 4 in the morning in a dark alley because you saw dips in some graphs.
[Trulia Insights via @alark]
Some of the shape has to do with when it’s recorded. (Something about that has got to be happening in Indianapolis.) And some of the shape may have to do with police shifts.
At least the odd shape in Indianapolis shows there’s something different with the criteria.
yeah, gotta figure that Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Charlotte have some data issues – the big dip for the latter two is Midnight, no? Once you level those three out, you’ve only got Philadelphia with a distinctly different curve from the rest…..
At least a time axis label would be nice. Maybe what the colors mean. Pretty shapes, but that’s about it…I don’t know what I’m looking at.
It might be worth noting that this is an interactive, and you get more information (including a time axis) as you mouse over each graph.
The colours are the different types of crime (key in the top right) – but I agree, a time axis label would be useful. Also if you filter by crime type it shuffles the charts so it’s hard to compare across types. Nice idea though.
Hey what about Boston! :)