US Violent Crime Report based on Marshall data

Shiny App for violent crime analysis in US

Changed goals

• How have your visualization goals changed?

  • After some valuable feedback and insights from @Tamara_Munzner and Samuel Hinshaw (@hinshaws) on my initial milestone goals, I decided to re-design my app and changed it's end-user.

  • Previously the US Crime Data App was meant for a police commissioner of a particular city and visualization had less context and usability, I have tried to simply for this milestone to get the app up and running first.

Refined App goals

• The App is meant for any official of Department of Homeland Security or any Federal criminal jurisdiction who wants to quickly understand Where are the crimes concentrated? , Which cities have shown increase over decrease in crime rates? between 1995-2015

• Apart from overall view of concentration of crimes across the US, the city-wise crime comparison is important to get an insight into how are the cities are performing against each other?

• The reason an official will be particularly interested in a city-level comparison is to understand how are the particular jurisdiction performing against each other and which cities need better judicial infrastructure and stronger law and order enforcement

• In short, the US Crime Report app provides a quick-view for concentrated and crime trends in the US based on the year and city (jurisdiction).

Does your app enable the tasks you set out to facilitate?

• For this milestone I have prioritized the development of the App with the above goals in mind
• I will be addressing the gaps in the app later, also right now the usability is very basic and aesthetics are minimal

About the app

• Intro provides a summary of app layout, navigation and usability.

  • So before making any assumptions, the user can understand the layout and what information is being conveyed

  • Carries information about navigation and how the marshall crime project come About

  • Additionally carries app developer's info and contact if a user you like to interact or suggest improvements

• A high-level overview of what each tab represent

  • Map:

  • Visualises the number of crimes between 1995-2015 by selecting the crime type based on the geographic concentration of crimes. The added feature of Show crime relative to Population normalizes the crime numbers by the population of the city

  • The instructions about zooming and viewing data labels using tooltips are included

  • Since it is a leaflet map, and not the most sophisticated of using map tools the user can find little problem initially to adjust the view and aspect relationship

  • WIP features: Instead of showing raw crime numbers for a city and all in green I will be implementing a colour scale of increase or decrease in crime since past 5 years, the colour scale will be red, yellow, green on a gradient scale based on increase in decrease in crimes

• Trends: Shows the trend of all crimes between two cities based on the user selection of time period and cities

  • The trends currently show pretty straightforward line chart of various cities
  • WIP feature: I will try to include a prediction or forecast for years after 2015, that is 2016-2018
  • Also, the aspect ratio of charts are not really good and there is no tool-tip, which I will add in next milestone

• Data: Based on year and city selection user can download data as a csv

  • Addition: I will give the user to select all or multiple cities to download data

Who made it? This app was created by Akshi Chaudhary, masters student of data science at UBC

If you'd like to get in touch; talk about this app, contribute to it, or make a suggestion for new features, contact via twitter @ChaudharyAkshi or on github akshi8