Data Analysis of Severe Crimes Committed in New York City

Author

Phenomenal Raichu
Karis Park, Elliot Kim, Hannah Lee, Ahana Shestra

Published

May 1, 2023

Introduction and motivation

  • Surges in robbery, burglary and other crimes drove a 22% increase in major crime in NYC

  • As Cornell students who often visit NYC over break, we were concerned about this increasing crime rate

    Research Question:

  • What area of New York can be identified as “most dangerous”?

  • What demographic groups are most likely to commit a crime?

Introduce the data

  • Data provided by the NYPD about each arrest that occurred in NYC in 2020 along with offender demographics, degree of crime and location

  • Data cleaning: dropping NA values and irrelevant columns, converting columns to factors, and renaming columns for efficient analysis.

Highlights from EDA

Analyzing the Most Dangerous Areas of NYC

  • Divided map into 1 x 1.05 mi^2 rectangular grids, resulting in 345 grids with equal areas.
  • Generated 95% CI through bootstrap distribution.

Analyzing the Most Dangerous Areas of NYC (Continued)

# A tibble: 1 × 2
  lower_ci upper_ci
     <dbl>    <dbl>
1     211.     291.
# A tibble: 88 × 4
   avg_lat avg_long common_boro num_severe_crimes
     <dbl>    <dbl> <chr>                   <int>
 1    40.8    -74.0 Manhattan                2666
 2    40.8    -73.9 Manhattan                1871
 3    40.8    -73.9 Bronx                    1804
 4    40.7    -74.0 Manhattan                1760
 5    40.8    -73.9 Bronx                    1568
 6    40.7    -74.0 Manhattan                1552
 7    40.9    -73.9 Bronx                    1489
 8    40.7    -73.9 Brooklyn                 1480
 9    40.7    -73.9 Brooklyn                 1455
10    40.8    -73.9 Bronx                    1417
# ℹ 78 more rows

Conclusions + Limitations + Future Work

  • Top 3 Dangerous Areas of NYC:
    • (40.75321, -73.99151, “Manhattan”, 2666) –> Block right next to Madison Square Garden
    • (40.81209, -73.94984, “Manhattan”, 1871) –> Central Harlem Region
    • (40.83884, -73.91632, “Bronx”, 1804) –> Block next to Claremont Park
  • Limitations:
    • Used data from 2020, so hard to ignore effect of COVID-19
    • Bias and under-reporting
  • Future Considerations:
    • Modify definition of “severe crime” by careful categorization
    • Join with population dataset to account for effect of population density