New Yorkers Hate Noise — NYC 311 Complaint Data Analysis
Using NYC’s awesome open data portal, I downloaded a giant data file about 311 complaints in New York city from Q1 2018 to Q3 2019. After waiting for 20 mins, I was excited to view the routinely updated dataset with over a 4 million records. I wanted to know what people in the most populated US city complained about most! 311 is a non-emergency phone number and website that people use to find information about services, make complaints, or report problems like graffiti or road damage. After first glancing over the data I was amused and surprised to see that there were 304 complaints in the data about people harboring bees. Cool to see that some people in urban areas are trying to save the bees!
I then focused on the most popular complaints made to the city as shown in the chart below. Different types of noise complaints (residential, street, construction etc) were merged into one category called “Noise”. As shown below noise complaints were number 1 with over 800,000 reports while “Illegal/blocked parking” complaints were next with about 600,000. “Heat/hot water” and “Street condition” complaints followed with about half of the complaints of “Noise”
I was then curious about which departments received the most complaints and thus may have the most “work” to perform in order to address all of these complaints. By far the New York Police Department (“NYPD”) had the most complaints tagged to their department as shown below. The next most popular agency was the New York Housing and Preservation Department (“HPD”) followed by the New York Department of Sanitation (“DSNY”). I was surprised to see the New York Fire Department (“NYFD”) has so few 311 complaints.
Since the NYPD had to field the most complaints by far; I was curious about exactly what types of complaints the NYPD dealt with most. As shown below the NYPD took on the brunt of the noise complaint work with about 735,000 of the 800,000 overall complaints tagged to their department. The NYPD also are inundated with about 600,000 Illegal parking and blocked parking complaints across the city. The rest of the types of complaints were much less frequent with the 3rd most popular type being Derelict Vehicles with about 60,000 complaints. I note the size of the plot points in the chart below are mapped to the number of complaint records; the bigger the point, the more complaints in that category.
As shown New Yorkers file 311 complaints most about noise in the city, which makes sense in such a crowded and densely populated city. These noise reports are fielded by the NYPD who also get the most 311 complaints overall tagged to their department. In a future analysis, I would like to see if the NYPD is allocated more money to respond to all of the 311 complaints they have to answer in addition to criminal complaints. This was just a light scratch into the depth of open data provided by New York City. Please take your time to look into the data yourself.
