Mapping Crime in the City by the Bay

Although we're a bit late to the game again, we thought we'd go ahead and do another comparison between some of our cyberscape visualizations and some other great maps floating (like sheep?) around on the interwebs. The following visualizations from Doug McCune use publicly available data from the City of San Francisco to map the incidence of various crimes around the city.

Actual Crime as Elevation in San Francisco

As one can see (and as Doug points out in his original blog post), the geography of crime in San Francisco is not only unevenly distributed in space, but also in terms of what crimes are being committed in different places. And while our visualization below shows only general references to "crime" in the Google Maps database, it demonstrates that the locations of virtual references to crime are actually highly correlated with the places that actual crimes occur.

Google Maps References to "Crime" in San Francisco

It's also interesting to note that the data for our map was collected in January 2009, while the city data used for the elevation maps covers all of the 2009 calender year. To see more of Doug's San Fransicso crime visualizations, you can see his original post here: If San Francisco Crime were Elevation.