Picture this
As I have mentioned previously on this blog, I am not a visual person by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe it’s the year and a half in journalism that has beaten much of my creativity out of me, or maybe my parents didn’t take me to enough art galleries as a child. Whatever it was, when I saw the first assignment for this course I got a horrible sinking feeling. This presentation would most likely end up as a visualisation of stick figures.
Fortunately for me, this was a group presentation and one of my teammates was a whiz at Photoshop – that just left the little matter of finding something in this information saturated culture that was considered invisible.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that gun violence is covered fairly extensively in the Australian media. Many news broadcasts in the past four-month period have included statics about the rising gun crimes which has created a culture of fear amongst everyday Australians – the mass media likes to spread the idea that many of these crimes solely consist of gangland shootings that wound and even kill members of the public.
Initially we wanted to map the breakdown of the gun violence in NSW; who was involved, what was the reason behind the shooting and what injuries occurred. Looking at the data we noticed that several of the news reports mentioned police intervention in some areas, but not in others. We decided to attempt to create a visualization that would show any possible correlation between the location of the shootings and the density of police concentration.
This was not a suggestion that police understaffing some areas and that was the sole reason for the shootings – we merely wanted to map the statistics and see the relationship between the two sets of data. This led to us investigating and constructing a table, which broke down the areas the shootings took place in, into their local area commands and the number of police who occupied the commands.
Our main concern was then how we were going to visualize the two sets of data in a way that was easy to understand by the general public. We decided to create two identical maps displaying individual data results and overlay them. For the police concentration we created a choropleth map, which is thematic map that has areas shaded in proportion to the different area commands.
To visualize the shootings we looked at ways other people had shown the spread of data and used a dot density map to chart the spatial pattern.
The visualization shows that the greatest police concentration corresponds with the areas that have the highest number of shootings. While our data does not allow us to make any comment about the allocation of government funding and resources we can say that there is not as much cause of panic as initially believed.