Crime is often associated regarded by how someone perceives the environment he or she lives in. There are often places in a city that are more dangerous than others. However, are these places somehow attributable to the infrastructure within the community?
One hypothesis is brightness in the surrounding environment. While not bidirectional, but in unsafe regions, dark areas are perceives as especially dangerous. To test this hypothesis, I use the Boston Police crime report data and map the list of crimes occurring during nighttime to streetlight deployment. While incident reports seem quite ubiquitous, the crime density still seems quite high and perceivable in regions that are less safe and with less light installations.
Further, divide the crime incident by type, we can observe a heavy tail in terms of crimes that are distant from the nearest lights, emphasizing the perceptive unsafe nature. For example, crime types such as vandalism, burglary, and forgery have clear heavy tail. It is interesting to see crimes like vigilante and violence also share this characteristic to certain degree. This quick study provides a unique perspective to how interventions that cause perceptive differences may be a potential way to thinking about solving current municipal issues.
Follow the link to see the visualization of the data analysis (Note: the page may take some time to load).
Great example of using public data to answer community-related hypotheses explaining social issues.
Did you consider sourcing people from these communities to help corroborate your hypothesis?