Weekly Viz 2024-01-01

San Francisco Police Stops 2018-2023

This is the first visualization of 2024! Time goes really fast these days, especially after I graduated. I have been making one visualization every week since 2018, when I started work. And this is the 7th year now. This week, I found an interesting dataset on Kaggle about San Francisco Police Stops between 2018-2023. Living in the Bay Area, I have heard many people talking about safety concerns when going to SF. So I am curious to see what are the most common police stop reasons in SF.

My Visualization

This visualization is a monthly line chart showing the # of SFPD stops by reasons. It by default highlights the highest volume category in orange, but you can hover on the labels on the right to highlight different lines.

Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

Dashboard link

Insights

• Traffic violation has the highest volume of SFPD stops – almost doubles the volume of the 2nd category before the pandemic;
• However, since the beginning of the pandemic (early 2020), we have seen a sharp decline in SFPD stops among all the categories. If you ask me to guess, I would have assumed the volume bounces back after the pandemic. However, this doesn’t seem to be true. It looks like the low SFPD stop volume has been the new normal, which might be related to new laws/policies, police budget, etc.

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