MURDER & VACANT PROPERTY IN PHILADELPHIA GROUP 5: [ SARAH CHO – RYAN MONKMAN – JASON NOREN – UMME VOHRA ]

BACKGROUND: CRIME AND VACANT PROPERTY

High vacant property rates have become a major urban problem for several US cities, including Baltimore, Detroit, Las Vegas, and St. Louis.

There are approximately 40,000 vacant properties in Philadelphia.

Objective – What is the impact of vacant property locations on crime incidents, specifically homicides? Do murder locations in Philadelphia substantially overlap with vacant property areas?

Importance – If there is an overlap of geographic locations of murders and vacant properties, the result is that cities’ efforts to fight crime should likely involve efforts to fight blight.

DATA ON MURDER AND VACANT PROPERTY

What type of data is needed for our scenario? Listing of all homicides within Philadelphia limits based on location Database of vacant properties during the same period when the homicides occurred

Where did we get the data? Criminal incidents from OpenDataPhilly database, 2012-2014 Vacant properties (residential and commercial) from Grounded in Philly database, 2012-

2014

DATA ON MURDER AND VACANT PROPERTY How did we use the data?

Needed to identify the required information and parse the large databases (70+mb) Refined the data to the following key elements

When did the homicide occur and at what location? Location of active vacant properties

Data gathering process Filtered criminal incidents to only homicides and verified with Philadelphia Police site for

accuracy Converted latitude and longitude information to zipcodes (Reverse Geocoding) Added a count column for both the vacant lot and homicide list Removed all other irrelevant data Decreased dataset from over 70mb to 250kb

Homicides vs. Vacant Properties

Darker color represents more vacant properties

Year over year: Homicides have decreased by 22% Vacant properties reported have

increased by 32%

Top zip codes with most number of: Vacant properties

19134, 19124, 19143, 19146 and 19120

Homicide rate 19134, 19124, 19143, 19132

and19140

Center City

OTHER GRAPHS

CONCLUSIONS

Philadelphia had 824 Criminal Homicides between 2012 and 2014 Average ~20 Homicides per ZIP Code Most Deadly is 19140 which is the Tioga/Nicetown section of Philadelphia

There are 8,552 Vacant Properties where homicides occurred Average ~204 Vacant Properties per ZIP Code Most relative Vacant Properties are in 19134 which is the Kensington

section of Philadelphia Model = Count (Homicides) = 0.108841*Count (Vacant Lots) + -

2.51929 R2 = 0.587407 P-value < 0.0001

It is likely that as the amount of Vacant Properties increases, the amount of Homicides also increases.

REFERENCES

Criminal incidents from OpenDataPhilly database, 2012-2014

Vacant properties (residential and commercial) from Grounded in Philly database, 2012-2014

Zwiefelhofer, David B. “Batch Reverse Geocoding.” Batch Reverse Geocode. FSBO Website Design, n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2015.