Why we started the “Understanding Crime in America” Project
The intensity of violent crime in America has made communities feel less safe. The frequency of homicides, drug related deaths, and other serious crime creates significant challenges for all cities. Behind these problems, is a complicated and intertwined backdrop of influencing factors. Analyzing crime data, and correlating it to other sources may lead to data-driven discussions between communities and their law enforcement partners.
Historically, police departments and federal law enforcement agencies routinely captured data. Today, city governments are sharing data to engage their communities by being more transparent about the services they provide. This data has become widely known as Open Data, because it is free to be reused or redistributed.
The release of open data is a complex issue. In the beginning, the data released was internal reports designed for meetings within Police departments and local governments. In recent years, open data has been augmented with raw incident data and data related to findings, which is more suitable for analysis.
At the start of these programs, some were concerned that too much data might reflect badly on the city or police departments. Location data, data on violent crimes, and other information are often withheld in the name of privacy. Compromising privacy and open data transparency are not equal. Metadata is a means to safely summarize and categorize data rather than releasing private information.
Metadata is information added to data to convey common facts. Metadata is important to understand a category of events and their correlation to other data. In crime data, metadata is often the information resulting from police investigations. For example, the Dallas Police Department has released comprehensive metadata with respect to victims of crime including gender, age, race, and many more details. Additionally, Dallas releases information about their assessment of the relationship between individual crime incidents and gangs, drugs, domestic abuse, and many other important factors. This enables more comprehensive analytics to be developed looking for correlations in other data sources, possibly leading to predictive applications.
Using this type of data, powerful analytics can be used to create new insight. In one large city, a Foxtrot Code App exposed geographic clustering of homicides. Inside those clusters uncovered, dozens of sets of 3–7 homicides, occurring within 10-days of the first homicide. Using our technology another user can investigate these patterns more fully, and find important actionable correlation and causation (see below).
Chicago Homicide Patterns
These maps are constantly refreshed and rendered from powerful analytics and live data streaming from cities. See this and more interactive maps on Foxtrotcode.com that are powered by Foxtrot Code Apps with live streaming data from cities.
Our applications on Foxtrot Code and the refined data they produce are only a part of a solution. However, as software applications, they can be applied everyday as a part of a multi-purpose toolset giving police and communities insight into how to interrupt patterns of crime.
Almost a year ago, we realized that our technology is capable of hosting a data project to help with this particularly important problem, and we began working toward this goal. We are not approaching the problem as researchers, but as a company that enables and facilitates others to build useful data applications to help increase everyone’s understanding of the problem.
Useful analysis of crime data is truly a numbers game. The more applications built, and the greater the number and diversity of the people involved, the greater our chances will be to find uniquely valuable solutions. The relatively small number of scientists and analysts employed by cities and law enforcement agencies can use these applications to power and prioritize their own solutions.
Foxtrot Code’s community can give others a head start by doing some of the heavy lifting, working with the data on our platform. The data refined through Foxtrot Code applications helps to enable everyone to move past rhetoric, misunderstanding, and bad information. Foxtrot Code Apps built by our passionate community can be resources to help accelerate the discussion about solutions.
As a company, we decided to take a chance and make “understanding crime” a way to focus the launch of our company nationally. Our company has funded $10,000 in cash prizes, for the developers that build the best apps. We also funded free use of our app development platform, and gathered together open data from 17 cities, as well as data from Twitter, The Weather Channel and many more sources.
We designed our platform from the beginning to be more accessible for people without coding skills to develop apps for data projects. Foxtrot Code is different from other data-oriented software companies with a focus on community driven software. The overall experience is designed to accelerate app development for data projects.
We aren’t philanthropists, we are technology startup entrepreneurs, but we felt that through this effort, with our community, collectively we could do our part to help law enforcement agencies and communities come together to find solutions. By showcasing the applications built by the Foxtrot Code community, we can encourage support of city governments and police departments to share more data. We also encourage corporations and foundations to join with us and fund their own prize for a specific data project on Foxtrot Code.
Learn more on Foxtrotcode.com about the “Understanding Crime in America” project and contest.
