Exploring Boulder Crime Over Four Years
As someone who has only recently moved to Boulder, safety was one of my biggest concerns. Doing a Google search did not help me with exploring this as sources differ from saying it’s one of the safest places in the United States to Boulder crime being on the rise. US News states that Boulder is one of the safest places to live, ranking 4th their best places to live in the United States. Compared to the national average, Boulder’s crime rate is significantly lower by ~100 crimes (US News). But to NeighborhoodScout, Boulder has “one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes…chance(s) of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 23” (Neighborhood Scout). With these sources telling two different reports, it’s hard to tell how safe Boulder really is in relation to United States crime data.
This led me to want to explore more of Boulder’s crime data by using the Boulder Police Department’s Offenses dataset. This is a publicly accessed dataset that is readily available for use through Boulder Open Data. This valuable resource spans the years 2020 to 2023, capturing a comprehensive array of reported cases detailing various crimes, each tagged with crucial temporal variables showing report cases of various crimes with temporal variables. Using this dataset, I wanted to explore Boulder crime. By doing so, I hope to have a more comprehensive understanding of Boulder’s crime dynamics, considering the contextual nuances that shape the patterns observed in the dataset.
Monthly Crime Trends
In the first evaluation of crime rates in Boulder, the dataset spans four years, from 2020 to 2023. For my first visualization, I wanted to explore the crime rate from January to December for the 4 available years within the dataset. The focus of this visualization was monthly crime rates in order to gain insight into how criminal behavior could be influenced by seasonal changes. My initial assumptions were that crime is considered a seasonal component as crime rates tend to increase during the hotter months. This could be for a variety of reasons such as more people going outside or mood changes due to hotter temperatures. Below is a line graph showing the total number of crimes across the months of 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023(for 2023, the data for all of December is currently not available at the time of writing).
Crime during the beginning of the year starts relatively average compared to the other data points within the graph. As the months progress, February and November seem to be on the lower side of total crimes. This graph shows that during August there is a peak in total crimes for all the years. I would say this could be due to Boulder being a college town so college students move to Boulder during the summer for the school year, which could cause an increase in crimes because there’s an increase in residents. It could also be due to there being hotter temperatures which could make people more irritable or they could go outside more often. To further explore this idea of whether temperature seems to have some sort of relationship with crime, below is a graph looking specifically at 2022 crime rates compared to max and min temperatures. The focus of this visualization was to see if there were any trends in crime and temperature.
This graph reveals that the highest crime incidents happen during August which is also one of the hotter temperatures during the year. There could be a causal relationship between temperature and crime rate as there was a shift in crime rates as the temperature got higher and a decrease in rates as the temperature began to fall.
Hourly Crime Patterns
To further explore Boulder crime data, I decided to look into the time of day in which crimes occur. In order to do this, I decided to create a catplot looking at the different types of crimes over a 24 hour period throughout the years provided by the dataset. The focus of this visualization was to see how crime was distributed throughout the day. I wanted to understand if specific crimes happened during different times compared to other times. My prior assumptions for this visualization would be that crime would mostly take place during the later hours of the day.
The graph shows that crimes are generally scaled towards noon or later in the day, but there are instances of crimes happening at all hours of the day like disorderly conduct, weapon law violations, and DUIs. This follows the general trend of when crimes tend to happen, more crimes occur during the PM hours compared to the AM hours of the day (Crime in America). I would assume this could be due to people feeling that during the PM hours, more people are awake. It could also be due to people tending to drink later in the day which could cause disturbances and drunk crimes during that time. Crimes happening more at midday like burglary or motor vehicle theft, these crimes might happen more around that time because more people are at work leaving cars alone or houses without people.
August Crime Analysis
For my final visualization, I decided to explore the most prevalent crime during August, since the total amount of crimes happened in August from the first visualization. I decided to create this visualization to better understand the distribution of crime across the years during August. The focus of this visualization was to look at what crimes generally happen more often in August, as well as if it is the same across the years or if there are years with higher crime types than others. My assumption prior to making this was that there would be high liquor law violations or disorderly conduct because I was assuming that these crimes would be due to the influx of college students moving to Boulder and partying.
This visualization revealed that the highest type of crime across the years was generally theft offenses. In 2020, trespassing was also a very high crime in August. In 2021, liquor law violations were the highest, this could be due to people drinking in public or using a fake ID to buy alcohol or possibly sellers not having proper liquor licenses. In 2022, trespassing, assault offenses, and liquor law violations were very similar on the graph in some of the highest crime types. In 2023, assault offenses were also very high. This was a very worrying insight to gain because this type of crime seems very dangerous.
Looking at all these visualizations, I was able to better understand Boulder Crime rates as a whole. There were reports talking about how there is a rise in crime within Boulder, but according to visualization one, the crime rates across the years are very similar. There seem to be more crimes in August compared to other months and that could possibly be due to the increase of temperature. The most prevalent crime, according to my final visualization, is theft offenses in Boulder, but most theft happens during the daytime according to my third visualization.
Being able to access data from the Boulder Police Department was very valuable for gaining a better insight into the crime rates within Boulder. I think it is ever as important to have readily accessible data for people to explore and look at to gain insight. I was able to explore more of Boulder’s crime for my own fears in the safety of Boulder. There is a lot of wariness around theft in Boulder, which made me realize that securing my belongings is very important. For crimes that involve liquor, they usually happen later in the day, which would make me less inclined to explore Boulder’s nightlife. The slow rise in assault offenses is also worrying for me, which also makes me less inclined to go out at night.
As I wrapped up my exploration into the offenses data from the Boulder Police Department, I was able to gain a better understanding of how safe Boulder actually is. Comparatively to the United States, it does seem like Boulder is generally safe and there aren’t a high amount of crimes per capita compared to the United States. But you know, even with all the data telling us that Boulder is on the safer side of things, it doesn’t hurt to keep a bit of caution in our pockets. It’s like saying, “Better safe than sorry.” The stats might paint a positive picture, but life can be unpredictable. So, in a nutshell, Boulder seems to be doing pretty well in the safety department compared to the grand scheme of things. Yet, it’s a reminder that life is full of surprises, and it doesn’t hurt to keep our eyes open and be mindful. Here’s to living in a great place and being a community that looks out for one another!
References
https://esfandilawfirm.com/do-seasons-weather-affect-crime-trends/
https://realestate.usnews.com/places/colorado/boulder/crime
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/co/boulder/crime#description
https://www.crimeinamerica.net/violent-crime-by-month-and-time/
https://open-data.bouldercolorado.gov/datasets/8ef054b1a3ca4ac496d75ec28f17a117_0/about
