Crime & Poverty

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Crime and Poverty in NYC

In this report, I seek to examine the link between crime and poverty in New York City. In numerous reports and previously established research there is a proven link between poverty and crime. As New York is one of the U.S.’s biggest cities and infamously home to a lot of crime, I felt this would be a good examination of crime. Additionally, New York has a huge poverty issue and with a lot of available data on their open data portal, as such, it was the optimal choice for data analyzation. My hypothesis: there is a positive correlation between the median household income of an area and the number of shootings that occur there.

For this project I utilized the software Excel to organize data and Tableau to create a visualization of the .GEOJSON data. I also used the theme “tactile” from R’s prettydoc() package.

Data Gathering

To begin, I went to New York’s open data portal, which is home to hundreds if not thousands of data sets all collected by the city and posted for public use and analysis. Choosing data created by the city also makes it easier to verify the information and validity of the source. I chose to use shooting incident data as my primary point of interest. I then extracted this data in .GEOJSON format (with the intention of creating a map showcasing all shooting incidents across the city).

Tableau Interactive Maps

I then used the software program Tableau to create several interactive maps that display median household income as well as locations of crimes with pop-up menus featuring more information about each crime. Note, the median household income is collected by Tableau and is according to the 2018 census blocks.

Please click through all the Tableau tabs to see all visualizations.

Conclusions

All of these finding have lead me to a few main conclusion.
1. The findings are mostly inconclusive.
2. That being said however, I can clearly point to areas of the maps where the median household income is lower and the amount of shootings is higher and concentrated.

In summary, while there is a connection that can be drawn between shooting locations and median household income, I cannot certainly say that one is directly responsible for the other. I.e. correlation does not imply causation. To say anything for certain I feel more data from the newest census blocks and from the newest NYC shootings would be necessary. Only when some patterns can be observed more specifically over time can a true conclusion be drawn. In order to yield better results, I would look to data collected more specifically and fully.