Preventing Hate Dashboard: Understanding Hate Crimes in New York City through Data Analytics and Geospatial Mapping
By: Shanna Crumley, NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer;
Abdul Rad, NYC Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes;
Hassan Naveed, NYC Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.
Last year, anti-Asian hate crimes surged 147% nationwide. In New York City, where New Yorkers of Asian descent (This number does not reflect people of more than one race) make up more than 14.5% of the population, the number of anti-Asian hate crime complaints reported to the police went from 1 in 2019 to 30 in 2020, according to public New York Police Department (NYPD) hate crime data. Of course, this statistic doesn’t come close to reflecting the many incidents that went unreported or were only reported to community organizations. But it does reflect how Anti-Asian hate crimes have continued to surge in 2021.
As the number of these incidents increased, the New York City Mayor’s Office of the CTO (MOCTO) and the Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes (OPHC) began to explore ways to address the hate crimes impacting Asian communities during the pandemic. Our approach was to integrate data from multiple sources to create a holistic overview of data on hate so that we could help New York City better understand the trends and allocate resources for community-based strategies to address and prevent hate crimes. Together, we developed the Preventing Hate Dashboard (PHD), a groundbreaking tool developed to better understand the landscape of hate crimes in New York City and their community impact, explore potential underreporting, and identify gaps using publicly available data on hate crimes and demographics.
Rising Hate Crimes in New York City
OPHC, one of the first offices of its kind in the United States, was established in 2019 to address hate crimes and bias incidents. As part of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, OPHC emphasizes the importance of improving community conditions as a way to reduce and prevent crime broadly. OPHC is a small office with a large mandate: to elevate non-law enforcement deterrence efforts — including public education, outreach, community safety models, and preventative best practices — to ensure communities most vulnerable to hate remain safe.
As the City saw an increase in xenophobic attacks against Asian New Yorkers, it became urgent for OPHC to understand as much as possible about this increase to develop the most time-sensitive and comprehensive responses.
Partnering with the NYC[x] Innovation Fellows
OPHC partnered with MOCTO’s NYC[x] Innovation Fellows to strategize ways to address underreporting and the spike in hate incidents. The program is a collaboration between the City of New York and U.S. Digital Response (USDR), a non-profit founded by former U.S. government deputy chief technology officers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, connecting governments and nonprofits with volunteer technologists to quickly deliver people-centered solutions. Through this partnership, MOCTO brought in a team of volunteer technologists — including a technical advisor, product manager, and two data scientists — for a 12-week data sprint to help OPHC identify, integrate, and analyze the City’s data.
The Underreporting Gap
We worked together to understand the hate crimes by layering data and exploring the reasons behind the absence of data. The first step was to pull together datasets from NYC Open Data and the NYPD to look at hate crimes and similar incidents and develop indicators to identify potential new data.
Front and center in the public conversation is the fact that reporting, proving, and — ultimately — prosecuting hate crimes is often difficult for a variety of reasons. Among them is the fact that many communities feel uncomfortable reporting crimes to law enforcement, leading to an underreporting gap in the data.
We speculated that more data existed because the number of official hate crime reports (reported to the NYPD) is much lower than the numbers of hate and discrimination incidents that are reported to other agencies and to community organizations. Through existing hate crimes research and the team’s own experience working to address hate crimes, we knew that official hate crimes data only captures a small percentage of actual hate crime incidents.
Underreporting of hate crimes can happen for many reasons:
- Concerns about immigration enforcement, retaliation, or other negative consequence
- Negative community relations with law enforcement
- Language or other access barriers
- Concerns about privacy and not wanting their identity shared publicly or with the government
- Believing that the incident was not significant enough to report to police or that it won’t be taken seriously
Goal: Integrate and Map Data on Hate Incidents in NYC
Together with our dream team of NYC[x] Innovation Fellow technologists, we drilled down on our key challenges:
- Challenge #1: We didn’t have an instrument or system to quickly gain a holistic view of hate incidents in NYC
- Challenge #2: We recognized we were working with limited data due to potential underreporting, especially about vulnerable communities
With these in mind, we decided on three goals for the NYC[x] Innovation Fellows project:
- Map hate incidents on a Citywide level to highlight communities that need support
- Study the factors leading to underreporting
- Identify potential gaps in hate or bias data
We hypothesized that with integrated data and a holistic overview, New York City would be better equipped to decide how to allocate resources for community-based strategies and inform effective policy.
The Preventing Hate Dashboard
We began by collecting publicly available datasets via the NYC Open Data portal and identifying other relevant public datasets we could use. Because datasets themselves can be biased, we wanted to gather data from multiple and varied sources to ensure an understanding of hate crimes in New York City as completely as possible.
Our project team worked with OPHC staff to review existing research on hate crimes. We found that the structural factors leading to reporting barriers reported by OPHC are consistent with academic research we had reviewed. Therefore, the team built an interactive GIS map of hate-related incidents and relevant demographics that allowed research staff to look at geography-driven trends, such as incidents along subway lines or within socioeconomic bounds.
Then, we designed the Hate Crimes Index (HCI), the first data product of its kind built for use in this context. The Hate Crimes Index combines data from the NYPD and other data and socioeconomic indicators into understandable scores. The HCI informs OPHC on prioritization of responses based on data from hate crimes, community conditions, and other data proxies indicative of potential underreporting.
To compensate for large-scale underreporting of hate crimes by communities that are hesitant to report for various reasons, we also built an underreporting index with the HCI. In doing so, we created a new, understandable measurement to indicate potential areas of underreporting of hate crimes and related incidents.
The underreporting index can help OPHC better prioritize responses based on data from hate-related incidents. For instance, the increasing number of incident reports in 2021 could be in part due to outreach efforts and increased comfort in reporting.
This is an important and innovative step taken by OPHC to harness technology and data to better serve underrepresented and vulnerable communities that are not necessarily captured in law enforcement data alone. With these new data insights, we wrapped up the project by helping OPHC design a dashboard and develop a tool for generating reports to inform decision-making.
Addressing Hate Incidents Citywide
At a time of increasing anti-Asian attacks and hate incidents, OPHC was able to put the Preventing Hate Dashboard into action, assessing data holistically. By layering data to identify patterns and gaps, this project helps OPHC move beyond a singular approach to criminal justice data. Rather, the Preventing Hate Dashboard helps OPHC visualize and analyze data to prioritize community-driven solutions.
As OPHC continues to elevate non-law enforcement deterrence, hate crimes prevention, and improving community conditions, the integrated data approach will help inform responses that protect the communities most vulnerable to hate incidents.
Shanna Crumley is the Senior Innovation Advisor at the NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer. Abdul Rad is a Research Manager at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. Hassan Naveed is the Deputy Executive Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.
The NYC[x] Innovation Fellows team included: Wayne Chang, Technical Advisor; Dhivya Ravindran, Data Scientist; Jared Lieberman, Data Scientist; and Rei Tran, Product Manager.
