San Francisco, the lovely City by the Bay, is generally a safe place to live, especially when compared to other cities of similar size. Homicides are about half of what they were a few years ago, and property crimes have continued to decline as well. With a booming tourist economy and resurgence in tech start-ups, it is no wonder that more and more people are leaving their hearts in San Francisco.
However, what appears to be a completely positive picture at the aggregate level turns out to be slightly less so when put under the lens of big data analytics. And that is exactly what a bunch of high school kids from the KIPP King High School in San Lorenzo, CA had the opportunity to do. They were working with SAP as part of a groundbreaking program called HANA for Humanity which enables students to work with data from non-profits and/or government agencies and help solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems using the SAP HANA in-memory database platform.
They analyzed around 1.5 Million crime records from 2003-2012 that the City has made publicly available (https://data.sfgov.org/), and overlaid additional data sets (e.g. location of liquor stores, presence of graffiti, presence of a police precinct in the neighborhood etc) to get a more comprehensive picture of the crime situation in San Francisco. When geo-location was taken into account, several hundred million data points had been collectively crunched to reveal the true face of crime & public safety in one of the most iconic cities on the planet.
What the kids discovered was at the same time instructive, fascinating, mind-boggling and downright scary. For example:
In the end, we found ourselves dealing with public data that had a limited depth to it e.g. we didn’t know the identity of the perpetrator, his/her demographic information, prior arrest and conviction records etc, all of which would have contributed greatly to developing deeper insights that the City can use to make the right public policy changes to positively impact the daily life of its residents.
What the kids did discover, however, was that Big Data technologies like SAP HANA can have a real and meaningful impact on a very pragmatic basis, and that analytics can reveal layers that may otherwise be hidden at an aggregate level. For e.g. 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 all small actions that City Hall can take to ensure that San Francisco remains not just an iconic landmark but a safe place to call home for its 800,000 residents.
As the great Tony Bennett song goes:
“The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I'm going home to my city by the Bay”
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