Taking advantage of New York City’s commitment to public accessibility re: data

Is crime beneath/immediately surrounding elevated trains different from (worse than) crime elsewhere? I had a tour guide (Robert Brenner, fantastic guy) yesterday tell us it was so. He was talking about the old Allen Street elevated train and the fact that the street beneath the track was a hotbed for Jewish prostitution. Apparently this was an issue in New York City at one point. So I’ll do this full analysis later and, for now, I’ll just focus on getting one of the datasets I need.

The City of New York makes crime data available on its Open Data Portal, I’ll be looking at it using the software R. For now I’ll stay far away from Rs spatial packages, such as sp, rgdal and maptools. Instead, I’ll focus on learning to use GitHub to blog and on getting into the routine of posting updates here (maybe a couple of times a week) regarding progress.

I’m filtering the last six or seven years’ of 311 data to focus only on NYPD-related service requests and minor offenses (not felonies or anything serious).