How Students Used Big Data To Analyze Crime In San Francisco

As cities go, San Francisco is a safe place to live: Homicides are about half of what they were a few years ago and property crimes are declining. The tourism trade is also up, and tech startups are resurging.

But students at KIPP King High School in San Lorenzo, California, have discovered that the picture is less positive when looked at through the lens of big data.

Working with HANA for Humanity, a groundbreaking program that enables nonprofits to solve problems using publicly available data in the SAP HANA in-memory database platform, the students were able to analyze around 1.5 million crime records from 2003-2012.

They then overlaid additional data sets — locations of liquor stores, whether there was any graffiti in the neighborhood, the presence of police precincts, etc. — from nonprofits and other governmental agencies. Several hundred million data points were crunched, revealing some surprising facts:

• One block of Bryant Street has had more than 30,000 documented instances of crime in the last 10 years, translating into one incident every three hours.
• There are 10 liquor stores where a vast majority of crime occurs — within a mere 0.2 mile radius.
• Crime against property continues to be an ongoing problem; and though violent crime appears to be under control, larceny/theft and vehicular theft account for 27% of the City’s reported crime incidents.
• Whenever the 49ers or the Giants have a home game, there's a 20% spike in crime. Weekend games result in much larger crime spikes than when games are held on Mondays. Additionally, crime levels vary, depending upon the opposing team and if there is a win for the home team (wins typically generated more crime than a loss or a tie).

Big Data technologies like SAP HANA can have a meaningful impact on society. Knowing which neighborhoods to police at what time of day, determining the optimal route for the police patrol car, ensuring that broken street lamps are promptly fixed and graffiti cleaned up before it begins to fester ... these are small actions that City Hall can take to ensure that San Francisco remains not just an iconic landmark but also a safe place to live for its 800,000 residents.

The original version of this article was written by Manju Bansal and published on SAP.

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