Project Journal, Week 9
This week as we continue to explore the variables that may correlate to the crime rate of Chicago and we settle for looking at unemployment rate vs crime rate.
A very interesting variable that we had to investigate was unemployment. This was driven by the impression that with more people having no jobs, there might be some interesting trend that can be shown from that. We took unemployment data from 1990 to 2019. There was not a lot of cleaning needed for this data except removing some unnecessary data that described the privacy and legal terms of the data. This was all done in excel and then we saved it as a csv file in order to use python for plotting.
The x-axis is the year and the y-axis is the unemployment percentage. We see salient observations from this data. The unemployment rate has been fluctuating a lot over time. Towards the end of 2006, we see the unemployment slowly starting the sharp increase. In 2010 it reaches its peak of over 12% but from there it starts to decrease. There are a lot of factors that may have caused those like political and economic factors but the main question is, does crime rate and unemployment correlate? It was very interesting and rather surprising to see the fluctuations there and having the crime data as a steadily decreasing graph. The graph of number of crime incidents is similar to the one on the first pages and it is as follows:
Initial thoughts on the effects of unemployment:
- More unemployment would result in more crime.
- Expecting a major correlation
- Constantly high unemployment
After the Analysis
- The trends do not look as if they are matching or spelling out relation at all although the crime data is starting from 2000.
- The data is showing that there should be another factor that is being implemented in Chicago that is leading to that decrease other than unemployment.
- If i take a look at the graph to the right number of crime incidents around the summer shows that temperature has a role to play in the Crime of Chicago.
The investigation continues and we still have more to offer. Watch out for our next blog post.
