Skateboarding has become a lot more popular in the past two years then it has for the past 15 years. In the 2021 Tokyo Olympics skateboarding will be featured as a sport for the first time. Additionally Louis Vuitton this past year signed this first professional skateboarder athlete which shows how more people are taking the sport seriously. One of the biggest parts of skateboarding and the culture behind are the skateparks. In the past skateboarding was typically seen as a delinquent activity or something that troublemakers did, for some people this makes skateparks ugly and make them not want to go near. With this analysis I hope to show that skateparks and the areas around them may not be as dangerous as some people think.
Looking at the LA skateparks and their crime data, the skateparks are not in the areas that have the most crime which seems to be around the Anaheim area. Additionally 13 out of the 23 skateparks are in the lowest per capita income range. Because there is more crime happening in other areas further away from the skatepark LA’s crime data and skate parks help prove my hypothesis.
While it is hard to see at first if you zoom in on neighborhoods you can see clearly that there are some that have a lot more crime in them then others. For the most part the skateparks are far away from the areas with the most crime which helps prove my hypothesis. In Seattle it seems most of the skateparks are in areas with higher income with lower levels of crime. This helps show that skateboard parks don’t necassarily have a bad effect on the neighborhood.
This is a crime dashboard that the city of Seattle came up and I saw they used tableau so I thought it would be cool to input the code ### Seattle crime dashboard
Overall looking at these two cities and comparing I was able to find that skateparks don’t necessarily relate to the level of crime in the area because there are other areas with no skateparks that have more crime. I feel like these two examples were able to prove my hypothesis, especially because the crime in Los Angeles was so divided and not related to skateparks. A limitation that I found with this hypothesis though was that I was not able to get all the data sets I would have liked. Ideally I could’ve looked at one or two more cities, but either I couldn’t find a dataset for skateparks in the area or I couldn’t find a data set for crime statistics.