Introduction In late 2017 I did an analysis of crime data in my neighborhood (The Heights) using the online Houston Police Department data.
This was so interesting that I foolishly decided to expand the effort to cover the whole city. After all, how hard could it be to go from analyzing one police beat with about 13,000 records, to analyzing 109 beats, with a corresponding increase in volume? This effort is still ongoing in fits and starts today, but I thought it would be useful to start documenting the journey now before the pain fades away.
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.