Datathon Final Submission

Author

Suk Jin Chung, Maisara Mackeen

Data Visualization

For this project, we chose the goverment prompt: Analyzing the Seattle Resident’s Customer Requests

To better understand service demand patterns, we conducted a data visualization analysis of customer requests submitted by Seattle residents. By examining trends across different time periods and service categories, we identified key insights to support resource planning and operational improvements.

Our analysis is organized into three parts:

  • Part 1: Visualizing Customer Requests Over Time

  • Part 2: Identifying the Department with the Highest Number of Service Requests

  • Part 3: Analyzing Total Requests by Different Service Types

The data was sourced from Seattle’s Open Data Portal.

Part 1: Visualizing Customer Requests Over Time

We analyze customer service requests across different time periods to uncover patterns in activity:

  • Month: Identifies seasonal trends and highlights months with higher or lower request volumes.

  • Quarter: Groups requests into broader periods, revealing business or operational cycles.

  • Day of Week: Shows whether requests are more frequent on weekdays or weekends.

  • Time (AM/PM): Differentiates customer behavior between morning and afternoon/evening hours.

  • Year: Observes changes and growth in customer requests across different years.

By examining these trends, we can better understand when demand for services is highest and identify potential areas for resource planning or operational improvements.


Attaching package: 'dplyr'
The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':

    filter, lag
The following objects are masked from 'package:base':

    intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

Attaching package: 'scales'
The following object is masked from 'package:readr':

    col_factor
New names:
• `` -> `...1`

Part 2: Department with the Highest Number of Service Requests

This section identifies which city departments received the highest number of service requests. We summarized the total requests by department and visualized the results in a bar chart. The chart highlights which departments handle the greatest volume of requests, helping to reveal patterns in public service demand across the city.

As seen in the bar chart above, SPD-Seattle Police Department has the highest number of service requests, which has a total of 256451 requests. This significant volume suggests that public safety concerns dominate service needs across the city.

To better understand the nature of these requests, we can further break down the types of issues reported to SPD.

A closer breakdown of SPD requests shows that the two most common service types are:

  • Parking Enforcement Requests (ranked #1)

  • Abandoned Vehicle/72-Hour Parking Ordinance Violations (ranked #2)

These findings suggest that a large portion of public demand on SPD is related to parking issues rather than emergency or violent crime concerns.

Given this trend, prioritization efforts could include:

  • Strengthening dedicated parking enforcement teams to manage non-emergency parking complaints separately from police units.

  • Public education campaigns to clarify parking rules, aiming to reduce violations.

  • Exploring technology solutions (such as app-based parking violation reporting) to streamline response times.

Shifting non-emergency parking enforcement away from core police operations could improve SPD’s capacity to focus on critical safety and crime prevention activities, while still addressing community concerns around parking and abandoned vehicles.

Part 3: Total Request by Different Service Types

This section calculates the total requests that each service types obtained by the City of Seattle per quarter from the beginning of 2021 to 2025.

Since there are a lot of service request types, the types are not that legible. The bar chart showing the counts of each type cannot be determined clearly – only the types with massive amounts of requests could be seen. Trends for each type could not be determined for certain due to the large number of data.

Therefore, we will get the top 10 service request type counts before doing a trend analysis for better graph legibility.

From the graph, the top 10 service types, in order, are:

  1. Abandoned Vehicle/72 hour Parking Ordinance

  2. Parking Enforcement

  3. Unauthorized Encampment

  4. Illegal Dumping / Needles

  5. Graffiti

  6. General Inquiry - Customer Service Bureau

  7. Pothole

  8. General Inquiry - Transportation

  9. Parks and Recreation Maintenance

  10. Overgrown Vegetation

Over the quarters, there seems to be an increase in request types from quarter 1 to quarter 3, before decreasing in quarter 4. A lot of the service types like Unauthorized Encampment, Illegal Dumping/Needles, Graffiti and General Inquiry - Transportation have the highest amount of requests in quarter 3. For Pothole, there is a significant decline from quarter 1 to quarter 2 and quarter 2 to quarter 3, before it increases again in quarter 4. For Overgrown Vegetation, quarter 1 and 4 have noticeable lower number of requests compared to quarter 2 and 3. For the others, there are small decrease and increase of requests in between the quarters. Overall, the service type with the biggest amount of requests is Abandoned Vehicle/72-hr Parking Ordinance for every quarter.