Comparing Crime in Two Cities - Kansas City and Seattle
the Project
In anticipation of an upcoming move, I decided to undertake a comparitive analysis of crime rates in Kansas City and Seattle. I was aware that murder rates in Kansas City were high - in some years the highest in the country, but I had no factual awareness of other aspects on the crime rates other than the gun shots I hear outside of my house every night. The intended audience for this presentation was my mother, who was convinced that crime rates were “really high” in Seattle. I examined crime from 2019 through 2023.
Data gathering and cleaning
Data for Kansas City crime came from data.kcmo.org - individual csv files were downloaded for each year. Extensive cleaning was required for this data - the columns were a little different from year to year, and the method of data entry for Kansas City crime reporting required extensive cleaning through repeated cycles to verify the data was correct compared to official crime reports.. Data for Seattle came from data.seattle.gov and was s single dataset that encomassed all crime reporting from 2008 to present. Both datasets were normalized to contain the same columns and column names, and combined into a single dataset which was brought into Tableau for chart creation.
Analysis
The total counts of all crimes in Kansas City and Seattle were 253,315 and 364,719 respectively. However when adjust for population per 100.000 residents, those numbers drop to 49,738 in Kansas City, and 49,269 in Seattle. Additionally, A larger portion of Kansas City’s crimes were Crimes against People, where Seattle had a proportionally larger amount of Crimes against Property. There was an interesting spike in Seattle property crimes in 2020 which I originally attributed to the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, but investigation revealed that it was almost entirely Identity Fraud related to Covid Relief funds (possibly all committed by 4 people - source 1, source 2, source 3). The murder rates in Kansas City when shown against a comparison city were particularly alarming.
Conclusion
I primarily focused on Violent Crime as defined by the FBI - Homicide, Penetrative Sexual Assault, Aggravated Assault. and Robbery. Overall, Kansas City has has a 7.5% increase in crime in those categories. Seattle has shown a 27% increase across the same categories. Despite all that, when adjusted for population, the crime rates are still much lower in Seattle, particularly in relation to violent crime.
Technologies Used
Python, Pandas, Excel, Tableau