Where are the Loud Neighbors? Late Night Noise in Sacramento, CA
2 November 2009
The Sacramento Police Department makes their dispatch database publicly available via monthly text files. These files are exported from Sacramento’s Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, which supports police dispatch and response functions in their 911 center. These files include information about each dispatch, including details like date and time, type of call – from homicides to traffic stops – and location.
The first few rows of the Sacramento dispatch export
It took just a couple of minutes to import one of these files into SpatialKey, where we can produce rich interactive maps and reports related to dispatch activity in Sacramento. The file from August 2009 contained about 30,600 records with location information. Dispatches for Disturbance-Noise were the 7th most common type of dispatch in August.
Heatmap of the 1079 Noise Disturbances in Sacramento during August 2009.
By using the Temporal Heat Index and Timeline to inspect the date and time of occurrence, we get a better picture of when Disturbance-Noise calls occurred. The Temporal Heat Index summarizes the number of crimes by hour of day and day of week. Notice the dispatch volume is generally highest late at night – especially on Saturday and Sunday.
Most dispatches related to noise happen late at night on weekends.
So where are these early morning disturbances? Simply select day/hour grids of interest and zoom in to see the detail. Here’s a look at noise disturbances southeast of Capitol Park between 1 and 3am on weekends in August:
Southeast of Capital Park might be a good place to party but a hard place to sleep on weekends.
Try it for yourself
You can open up the sample report that we created to visualize these dispatches. The report is fully interactive, so you can really explore the dispatch activity in Sacramento. We saved the report with a filter for Disturbance-Noise. Try modifying this filter – and adding others – to see how SpatialKey works. Interested in seeing where and when the 338 Drunk Suspects were encountered? Or the 27 Shooting into Inhabited Dwellings? Maybe you want to see where and when the 2246 Subject Stops occurred. It’s simple with SpatialKey.
Looking for easy-to-use location intelligence from your own data? Get started with our free trial, and start visualizing your data in minutes without installing any software.
Notes
The images and reports in this post were created with publicly accessible data. Check out Sacramento’s dispatch page to see their notes about what data is included. We omitted data without address location in our SpatialKey report.
We have no association with the Sacramento police department (but we’d love to, so contact us if you’re from the Sacramento PD and want to use SpatialKey). SpatialKey does have specific features designed for Law Enforcement.
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