Houston Crime Statistics

A debate began on my neighborhood list. “Crime is increasing in the Heights!”, “Crime is not going up in the Heights!” and so on, back and forth. Then someone noted that all the crime data is on the Houston Police Department website, so someone could just download the data and answer the question. I thought to myself, “I could be that someone”, so I started working on it. After a few months, I had a rather nice report on crime in the neighnborhood, several Shiny apps to allow public perusal of the data, and I presented it all to a neighhood meeeting which included our local Constable. He and his staff were impressed and very supportive.

Then I foolishly decided that I should do the same exercise for the entire city, after all, it is only about 10 times more data. Of course, by doing so, I discovered errors and bad assumptions in the original work, and I am still working through those. It also became obnoxiously labor intensive, so I want to try to eliminate some of the data cleanup labor. This should keep me busy for the rest of the year.

My initial work, my prototype, is crime in the Heights, including some Shiny interative plots.