New York City Summons
I worked on this project in the Spring of 2020 as part of Cooper Union’s Data Science for Social Good class with a small team of students from the art, architecture, and engineering schools. This project explores the nature of policing in New York City related to criminal summons geographically and temporally from 2006-2019. The analysis investigates the connection between the development of CompStat, the shift in policing between the years in which Michael Bloomberg was mayor and Bill de Blasio was mayor of New York City, and differences in policing between neighborhoods.
The website includes four main visualizations: summary statistics, an overview map of New York City summons, an interactive search function, and a visualization of the transit summons given out in the year 2017.
The overview map of the total individual summons shows the individual summons given out by the NYPD from 2006-2019. The visualization allows the user to toggle between summons violation categories and individual years and gives an overview of the general trends in summons violations over the five boroughs of New York.
The summons locator was developed to allow a user to explore the differences in quantities and types of summons issued across New York City. The summons locator includes both an interactive search function which allows a user to input any address in New York City and a list of the top ten summons issued within a block of that address is generated. In addition to the search function, prefilled addresses are included to allow the user to explore the differences in summons quantities and types across a variety of types of neighborhoods in New York City.
Data visualizations provide an overview of the top summons categories and the display a clear cyclical pattern in summons distribution each year as well as a clear shift in policing between the mayoral terms of Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio.
The summons map was designed to highlight the differences in policing for various subway stations across New York City. The visualization depicts the total number of summons given out near subway entrances and exits for the year 2017.
Analysis was conducted using data sets provided by Harry G. Levine and NYC Open Data. This project was done in collaboration with Anna Burholt, Ariana Freitag, Joey Bentivegna, and Willem Smith-Clark.