In the newest July 2008 issue of Atlantic Monthly, contributing editor Hanna Rosin tackles the question "Why is crime rising in so many mid-sized American cities?"
The answer was discovered when the police shared their data with someone who created a visual map (seen in the print magazine) of the problem. The North Memphis police shared their crime data with University of Memphis criminologist Richard Janikowski, and he turned that data into an answer.
He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.
By sharing their data, the police were able to let a private citizen create a tool for them, and obtain new information in the process. It was a win-win situation, and a great reason for government data transparency.
When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged... Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city...
What he came up with ended up showing a correlation between new Section8 housing and crime, a very unpopular and controversial result, and something not intuitively discoverable.
Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with [a] map of Section8 rentals... On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.
Most of the article deals with the implication of this outcome and how to handle it, and the complex socio-economic issues it raises.
On a side note, our Louisville police chief also got involved, and a University of Louisville professor was looking at these patterns too.
The “Gathering Storm” report that worried over an upcoming epidemic of violence was inspired by a call from the police chief of Louisville, Kentucky, who’d seen crime rising regionally and wondered what was going on. Simultaneously, the University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local patterns of violent crime.
It's great to see such a terrific outcome come from the sharing of public data and is just the sort of thing the OMG Standard is trying to accomplish. A success story, but it only came because of the years of trust that Janikowski garnered by working with the local police full time. Months or years could have been shaved off the timeline if the data was made easily available to the public from the beginning.
"Collectively, these mashups have been widely recognized as game changing web concepts that have helped to bring geographic relevancy to millions of points of information."
Alright, this is going to freak a lot of you out, but contrary to local and national reports, Google has updated their street view for Louisville and Lexington Kentucky!
The NetSquared Year 3 conference in San Jose was a fantastic blast, and I wanted to share some of my experience with you all.
Ben Peskoe and I left for the conference on Monday afternoon May 27, and arrived in San Jose Monday night. We stayed at the Hilton in Santa Clara which was near the Yahoo campus, and as soon as we checked in and took a look at the view, we were off to the Meet and Greet event.
We retired to the hotel lounge and chatted some more with great folks like Georget Lajtai and Zoli Piroska (two Hungarians from Greener One), Christine Egger and Peter Deitz (from Social Actions), John Kim and Peter Manzo of Map This!, and the Scotsman Thomas Turnbull from My Green Map.
Then next Tuesday morning was the start of the conference, and we met Matthew Saunders from PingVision who was giving a speech on Drupal, and Sean Tanner of MapLight.org on the bus over to the Cisco Conference Center. Ben and I setup, making sure our branding and marketing was clearly visible to all. Our Project Lead, Ted Ko, shows up and helps us get ready, and sets up a 19" LCD that he brought so we could show the site.
Lots of people were intrigued by he story of the community designed logo through the site 99Designs, and thought it meshed well with the community aspects of the Your Mapper concept. We used the logo a lot, and I think everyone was familiar with it by the end of the conference. I'm surprised more projects did not show off their project through t-shirts (from Kopilot), logo, and branding. I think Know More was the only other project with shirts.
So the conference begins, and I think everyone is still writing their 2-minute speech or is just going to wing it. Mine is towards the end and seems to get lots of people over to our table for the Carnival, tradeshow-like event next. Here the three of us talk to a non-stop barrage of people and unfortunately don't have time to talk to everyone that comes by. Some of the people include Rob Miller with the Open Planning Project who is doing some great open map stuff, Tantek Celik who shows me the benefits of hCard, and Andrew Turner and Mikel Maron at mapufacture who are creating tools to load and manage geographic data and who have a neat logo too. To top it off Roselind Newland stops by, who works for TechSoup but is originally from the Louisville KY are and wants to return some day. Chad Dickerson from Yahoo stopped by to talk about his Fire Eagle, and David Collin from the American Cancer Society was interested in our OMG Standard.
After the Carnival and other speeches are over, we break for a terrific lunch outdoors, with Vegetarian and Omnivore lines. Then the three project panel discussions begin, along with other speakers, and will continue until lunch on Wednesday. We watch the first panel discussion, then I head out to a session on "Getting the Most Out of Your Online Community" then to the Hack Room, then the Drupal presentation.
In between sessions Ben and I do an impromptu video interview, which you can watch here:
Scott Dyer finally shows up from Louisville after a flight delay, and he joins the Your Mapper team, ready to shine and show his enthusiasm for the project. Ted heads home, and we go back to the hotel for a night of dinner, drinks and entertainment. The dinner is great, and I finally get to talk with Justin Massa of MoveSmart.org about the Illinois IDEA initiative and share some of my successes here in Louisville.
At dinner I talk with JD Lasica from Ourmedia, who is very interested in the OMG Standard and writes for the IdeaLab blog on PBS.org, and knows Steven Clift from e-Democracy.org whom I talked with a few days ago on the phone. JD later interviews me and records this great little video interview and blog post.
Next I talk with Laura Welcher from the mind-blowing Long Now Foundation and the Rosetta Stone project. We discussed her project, and all things map related, including time-based diachronic maps, and the inherent difficulty of showing lots of overlapping regions on maps.
The final day started on Wednesday with a tale of Scott's 5 am trip into the mountains to watch the sunrise. All four of us donned their Your Mapper tshirts for the day and we headed to the conference. I headed to Benji Burrell's presentation of the iLoveMountains.org website and I have to say it was one of the most impressive presentations and uses of technology at the entire conference. I spent the next session writing my 7 minute panel speech, which began at 11:20am. This setup was much more comfortable to me, and I told a few stories and answered some questions along with two other projects: Rosetta Stone and Social Actions.
We had a quick lunch while I sweated the final 2-minute speech, and decided this time to just write an outline of key points and speak more off the cuff. I think it went pretty well.
The final presentations were next, then the voting block. Every attendee got 3 coins that they could use to vote for any number of the 21 projects. We fielded a few more questions at our Your Mapper table from Allison Bradley at SoulMilk and Meagan Hessel at the Charter Association and My Schools.
The vote results then came quickly, with first place deservedly going to Ushahidi. After that we wrapped things up, said goodbye to Ted, then headed to the In and Out Burger (those are good burgers) for a celebratory dinner. Scott left us for the airport, Ben and I were back at the hotel, and spent a little time using the hotel amenities. We chatted some more with the attendees, then got ready for our all-day flight back to Louisville.
It was a great conference and I was pleased just to be a part of it, making new connections and learning a lot about this trail-blazing space we are all occupying. Now back to my topophilia.
