Data App Project
2025-04-21
About Section
Chicago is at times seen as one of the most violent and gang-affected cities in America. With media narratives often focusing on spikes in homicides and public concern over safety in specific neighborhoods, we wanted to dig deeper and get the real story from the data.
Our project explores homicides in Chicago from 2001 to the present (excluding the most recent seven days) using data from the Chicago Police Department’s CLEAR system. While the original dataset contains every type of reported crime, we trimmed it down and focused exclusively on murders from 2018 onward. We felt this was the most impactful type of crime to investigate, not only because it is the most severe but also because it tells us something deeper about how violence in the city changes over time and where it tends to concentrate.
Chicago is known for having high levels of gang activity, especially in certain neighborhoods. We believed this dataset could reveal key patterns about where and when murders occur, and even what types of physical spaces are most vulnerable. These are the kinds of insights that could potentially inform policing decisions and community safety efforts.
Hence, we designed this dashboard to answer three essential questions:
- How have murder rates changed over time in Chicago?
- Where do murders occur most frequently across communities?
- What types of locations are most common for murders — on streets, in alleys, parking lots, or indoors?
Our visualizations, both static and interactive that are shown later, reveal that murder trends do not move in a straight line. Instead, there are clear spikes and dips, such as the drop after 2018 and the rise post-2020. These trends suggest that external events or policy shifts may be playing a role. One explanation that aligns with our findings is the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw homicide rates spike across major cities. However, after 2021, the data shows a notable decline in murders, a pattern that reflects broader national trends. During a February 2024 meeting at the White House, President Biden highlighted this shift, stating that “last year, the United States had one of the lowest rates of all violent crime in more than 50 years.” This drop has been partly credited to the stabilization following the pandemic and federal support through programs like the American Rescue Plan, which helped fund local safety initiatives and community policing across the country, including in cities like Chicago.
Our community map highlights which neighborhoods are consistently high-risk, helping to pinpoint the most dangerous areas in the city. We also broke down where these homicides happen more specifically, not just the neighborhood, but the exact type of location. Whether on the street, in an alley, or a parking lot, this layer of detail helps us understand not only where violence is concentrated but also what kinds of spaces people should be most aware of.
This project does not just show numbers. It builds a story around danger, time, and place. In a city that has struggled with public safety for decades, understanding these deeper patterns is a strong step toward real change.
Static Visualizations
In this bar graph, we wanted to explore communities that saw the most murders in Chicago. Austin certainly stands out as a community with a lot of murders due to it nearly having 200 murders more than the next closest community, South Shore.
In looking at the top 10 populations, this introduces some interesting aspects that we will use in our interactive section. One insight we get from this is that the second highest community in terms of number of murders (South Shore) is not even in the top 10 of populations. Furthermore, we see that Lake View has the highest population in Chicago, but not in the top 10 of number of murders. This helps show that per capita murders will be very helpful in our interactive section to understand the level of crime in these areas.
This static line plot helps establish the point made prior, in that murders significantly decreased after 2021, possibly due to the passing of the American Rescue Plan. In our interactive section, we will also include this plot with some interactive features to see explore trends across communities as well, and see if trends hold up across the different communities.
This pie chart helps us establish that a lot of the crime, over fifty percent of it, occurs on the street. This strongly suggests a lot of the crime in Chicago is gang related, rather than being domestic and private affairs. We’ll break this down further in the interactive bar chart, showing how location types vary by neighborhood.
Interactive Section
