Overview

The following project looks at crime in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 2010 to 2016. I am very interested in this data since I’ve lived in Minneapolis for the past 10 years. The data was compiled by Megan Risdal on Kaggle.com by way of the Open Data Minneapolis Project. There are over 136,000 dated unique crime events in the data which provides a lot of fodder for data analysis.

Exploratory Plots

The following plots give some indications of fruitful directions to follow for analysis

Plot 1: Crimes by Season

In this first plot we can already guess that seasonal weather has a lot to do with the number of crimes committed each day. For this reason, I requested past weather data for Minneapolis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). The side-by-side plots below are quite compelling.

Plot 2: Crimes by Week of the Year

In this clock plot we can see the effect that the week of the year has on number of crimes committed. As discovered in the first plot, the warmer months have the higher crime rates, though a small spike in crime happens around New Years Day. Weekly crime will probably be the easiest value to predict because it smooths out the daily fluctuations in crime and averages over 6 years worth of data.

Plot 3: Crimes by Hour

In this clock plot we can see the effect that time of day has on the number of crimes committed. As expected, the evening hours contain the most crimes with a sharp spike for crimes committed between midnight and 1 AM. This could be that when crimes occur overnight, officers recording the details of a crime commmitted at an unknown time simply enter midnight as the time of the crime. This turns out to be a valid interpretation since 58.49 % of the midnight to 1 AM crimes have a begin time of exactly 12:00 AM.

Plot 4: Crimes by Type

In this histogram, we can see what types of crimes are being committed most often. It turns out that 9/10 of the top ten crimes are theft-related comprising 86.71% of the total crimes commited during this timeframe.

Plot 5: Crimes by Neighborhood

In this map overlay, we see every crime committed plotted as a point colored according to the neighborhood it occured in. I didn’t even recognize the name of the highest hub of crime in Minneapolis but was able to guess where it might be: downtown. I was a bit disturbed to see my neighborhood coming in 4th.