As part of my quest for using data to find answers to everyday questions using Power BI – after analyzing baby names and eating habits – I turned to crime data for the city of Baltimore.

Data is obtained from Open Baltimore and I used Power BI Desktop. Once you download the data, creating theese dashboards is straight-forward. You simply have to create a few columns based on existing columns and play around with the visualizations until you’re able to convey the story you want to put out. So I’ll skip the how-to-create-this-dashboard part in this post.

Make sure to click on the images as you read through. It’ll be fun!

When does Crime Happen

As you can see below – categorized by the bright red color – summer months record high crime activity compared to colder months. This makes sense. People are more on the streets in summer, and more people means more probability for crime to happen.

The line charts at the bottom show the number of incidents by day and time. There is a general slowdown in early hours until 5 AM before there’s a spike again. In the summer months, bad guys are busy from evening into mid-night, but in winter months things seem to be calming down from 6 PM.

Click on the image to see full size.

Is there a Slowdown

You may have seen discussions about police slowdown since the recent unrest in Baltimore. To find out if there’s any truth to this argument, let’s look at the arrests and crimes for 2014 and 2015 from Jan to Jun.

At first glance, you’ll see that trend lines for arrest and crimes follow a pattern until May 2015 when crime starts to go up and arrests begin to come down. In 2014, Feb has the lowest number of arrests (bright red circle in top scatter) but pattern between arrests and crimes is still the same. However in 2015, May sees an unusual decrease in the number of arrests although crime is up. Click on the image to see a timeline on what happened in May 2015.

On the other hand, violent crime – shootings, homicide, etc., – increased to record levels in May 2015 compared to the previous two years.

Remarks

What’d I loved to have in PBI Desktop for the visualizations I posted in this blog post?

Ideally I’d want to use a heat map for the first viz (when does crime happen) to see combinations of Month/Day and Month/Time to identify trends. However, as of 07/26/2015 heat maps are unavailable in PBI Desktop. Vote here if you want this feature added.

I also wanted to see where crime takes place, but found the map control in PBI Desktop to be slow in responding for what I was trying to achieve. I couldn’t come up with a meaning full viz in the time I was able to spend on this. It may be just me, but I think there’s room is for improvement here with respect to zooming and rendering time. The following is how I wanted the map to look.

Freeze, Don’t Move

In this dashboard, you saw trends around occurrence of a particular event (crimes and arrests). This type of dashboards can be used in different businesses. For example, a retail company can use it to see when most of the sales happen. The insights you gain from this can be used to plan for efficiently utilizing your resources. Get started with Power BI Desktop for free.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the type of visualizations I used here. Please leave a comment below.