Posted on May 20, 2018 in blog • Tagged with R, ggplot, visualization, transit
Anyone who rides MUNI regularly has seen fare inspectors checking Clipper cards, and writing citations. What influences the number of citations written on any given day - does weather have any impact? The answer is yes, but the details are more complicated.
Posted on January 07, 2018 in blog • Tagged with R, python, prisons
How does the state of California measure prison overcrowding? It looks at the total number of people in its prisons and compares it to the combined capacity of its 35 state prisons - the Supreme Court ordered California to decrease its prison population to 137.5% of the system's designed capacity. Yet 15 out of the state's 35 prisons have populations exceeding 137.5%. Is that the correct way to measure overcrowding? This post explores why an aggregated measure like this can be misleading, and suggests a few simple alternatives.
Posted on December 19, 2017 in blog • Tagged with visualization, R, ggplot, criminal justice
Public Defender's Offices are extremely understaffed - this post looks specifically at California, and compares the size of the District Attorney's Office vs. the size of the Public Defender's Office in California counties. Despite handling ~80% of serious criminal cases, the median Public Defender's Office in California counties has just 43% the number of employees of the District Attorney's Office.
The Cook County State's Attorney's Office released an interesting dataset on how their prosecutors have handled thousands of cases since 2011. It turns out that narcotics cases are initiated differently from all other types of cases - this article explores how "direct filing" leads to a significant number of narcotics cases being dismissed. What would happen if those defendants weren't charged to begin with?
Posted on November 18, 2017 in blog • Tagged with R, rbloggers
A technical introduction to the R package dplyr, using disposition data provided by the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.
Posted on September 24, 2017 in blog • Tagged with visualization, R, ggplot
Using data provided by the FBI and 18F to see how police forces have grown over time.
Posted on May 04, 2014 in blog • Tagged with visualization, R, python, ggplot