criminology

What Works

This map uses a two color pie chart scheme to represent increases and decreases in violent crime respectively. It also breaks the pie into pieces for added granularity of detail – one for murder, one for forcible rape, one for armed robbery, one for aggravated assault. (also known as mincemeat pie, right?)

What Needs Work

I still think there’s got to be a better way to represent gains and losses on a spectrum. Changing from one color pie to another at zero is a little arbitrary. Three dimensions might help – states with increases in crime could bulge while states with decreases could sink.

I included this graph not so much as a particularly good or bad example of building an info graphic but as a contrast to the previous post. This is a typical depiction of crime mapping. It depicts violent crime by victimization. Most crime coverage focuses on this salacious category – rapes and murders and beatings.

Relevant Resources

Ford, Steve. (2006) Map of Violent Crime in the USA 1978-1998

What Works

The beauty of these graphics is that, given their captions, they are instantly legible. On the left, the map shows where crimes are committed in 1998. It’s a diffuse pattern with a few warm spots. On the right, the map shows where the imprisoned population calls home (2003 data). It’s an image with vivid hot spots amidst a sea that’s mostly dark. In thirty seconds or less, viewers can see that while crimes are committed all over Brooklyn, the population in prison tends to come from a handful of very localized neighborhoods. It would have been easy, and easy on the eyes, to use two different colors for the different maps, but because this idea works as a comparison, it’s important to keep the color scale the same across both images.

These maps are used as tools of analysis and pattern recognition, helping to make data legible both for the public and for the researchers who use these tools not only as tools for publication but also as tools of analysis. They go further, augmenting these maps with finer grained maps as you’ll see if you keep reading.

What Needs Work

A stronger outline of Manhattan would help non-New Yorkers recognize the location immediately.

More Than Critique

This post reminds us that there are many victims of crime. The authors’/graphic designers write, “If crime maps succeeded dramatically in mobilizing public opinion, redefining the city as a mosaic of safe and unsafe spaces, and forcing the reallocation and targeting of police resources on specific neighborhoods, the gains were short-lived. The resulting crime prevention techniques, and the community-policing movement in general, soon reached the inevitable limits of any purely tactical approach. The city spaces that were targeted came safer, but too often crime incidents were simply displaced to other locations.”

Nobody is denying that being mugged or raped or murdered is fun for the person who was mugged or raped or robbed or murdered. But the report by the Spatial Design Lab at Columbia University sponsored by The Architectural League that uses maps as a tool of analysis and discovery to suggest that because perpetrators live in areas with lots of other perpetrators, those entire communities are also the victims, not of the crimes per se, but of the impact of high concentrations of recurrent incarceration. Convicted people go away to prison leaving these neighborhoods with a gender imbalance (only 12% of the prison population is female). The money spent to imprison this largely male population is not being invested in developing these communities. This study finds a block where $4.4m has been spent to imprison its one-time residents. One block, $4.4m.

The authors pose the question their maps have helped make obvious: “What if we sought to undo this shift, to refocus public spending on community infrastructures that are the real foundation of everyday safety, rather than criminal justice institutes of prison migration?”

Relevant Resources

Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University (2006) Architecture and Justice sponsored by The Architectural League.

Spatial Information Design Lab Main Page

The Architectural League

Crime and Criminal Justice

The theme for this week, in case you haven’t figured it out by glancing at the graphics, is crime, deviance and justice in these here United States. I thought it would be a nice exercise to see what is available from official sources (ie government agencies). In the US, we’ve got the CIA, the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and then lots of state and local agencies. I stuck with the feds here but the rest of the week will look at cities and states as the level of analysis. So far, none of the federal agencies has produced a graphic that tells a comprehensive story about incarceration, crime, and/or justice in the US. I couldn’t even find much about the immense expenditures dedicated to incarceration (in a handful of states, more is spent on criminal justice, including incarceration, than on education). There also were very few graphics dedicated to the differential impact of incarceration practices on poor and minority communities.

CIA

The CIA doesn’t do much with graphics, but this is what they had to say about the US and drugs: “world’s largest consumer of cocaine (shipped from Colombia through Mexico and the Caribbean), Colombian heroin, and Mexican heroin and marijuana; major consumer of ecstasy and Mexican methamphetamine; minor consumer of high-quality Southeast Asian heroin; illicit producer of cannabis, marijuana, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, and methamphetamine; money-laundering center”

I would love to see this on a map, especially if the map were able to show how much of our illicit habit, by weight, is made in America and how many people and plants in other countries are dying to stock our habits.

FBI

The FBI doesn’t do much with graphics either, but they had this factoid box:

This is an easy but illogical way to summarize data points. This style of arbitrary ratio style summary misses opportunities to provide context and compelling visuals. X crimes per unit of time seems a strange way to measure; going by victims or convicted criminals by 100,000 people or by percentage of the total population might make more sense. Furthermore, a good information graphic should begin to tell the story at first glance, before you have to read anything. One quick test: if someone who doesn’t speak the language can’t make heads or tails of the graphic, it just isn’t that good. Granted, language is often necessary to pin down the details, but the overall theme should be clear without resorting to text. There’s no way to tell this is about crime in America. Again, I’m always skeptical of these ratio summaries. It’s really hard to understand much about crime by recounting how often it happens. Then smaller populations are going to look safer because crime happens less often even though it might be just as common in terms of the percent of the population who ends up becoming a victim or a perpetrator.

Bureau of Justice Statistics

The Bureau of Justice Statistics had by far the most info graphics though, as you can see, they are all the same style. As for “What Works”, well, it works that they tried to map trends in crime over time graphically. What needs work? Besides the rather uninventive presentation – I think these line graphs are easily understood but so standard in appearance that they risk putting people to sleep – my biggest concern is that there is no overview graphic that tells the whole story. All of these graphs tell one tiny little part of the story and are designed to be read in isolation from all the other graphics. In that sense, they help viewers understand crime and punishment in America about as much as that FBI Crime Clock factoid box does. Information graphics are at their most deceiving when they appear to be depicting simple, straightforward relationships in absence of all the messy real life context that frames just about any problem on the ground.

Just to take one example, the graph showing victims by gender is on the brink of revealing one of the most interesting elements of the bursting incarceration system. Violent crimes are way down but the prisons are bursting indicating that more and more of the people in prison are serving time for property crimes. That’s why I included the arrest rates for drug crimes – the huge majority are for possession, most likely possession of marijuana. It bothers me that I have to throw in little graph after little graph to tell a partial story. I couldn’t even find a little graphic that shows that black folks are far more likely to be arrested for possession than white folks even though white folks are slightly more likely to use (marijuana) than black folks. Community policing gone wrong? Perhaps.

If you know of a graphic that attempts to tell the story of the three-strikes/broken windows policy impacts on incarceration practices all in one image, please send it in and I’ll amend this post and thank you profusely.

Relevant Resources

FBI Crime Clock

CIA World Fact Book – United States

Bureau of Justice Statistics – Key Facts at a Glance