Unveiling NYC Policing Patterns through Data Visualization and Analysis
by Rebecca Hicke
The Challenge
As a Siegel Family Endowment PiTech PhD Impact Fellow in the summer of 2023, I worked with Good Call NYC to analyze New York City’s arrest data. Early legal representation has a large impact on the future of arrested individuals but not everybody has access to it. Although US citizens have the legal right to a lawyer, public defenders are not assigned a case until several hours before the arraignment trial, which can be up to 72 hours after arrest. In effect, early legal representation is only accessible to individuals with the money to hire private lawyers and the means to contact them from the police station.
Representation during those 72 hours can have a significant effect on the long-term outcomes of a case, as a 2018 study by the San Francisco Public Defender’s office found. Early contact with a client gives lawyers more time to prepare their case and to arrange in person demonstrations of the defendant’s community ties, which can have a large impact on a judge’s decision. Early involvement in a case also allows lawyers to access material during critical stages of a criminal investigation, file for bail reduction, and take other steps to prepare for later elements of the trial. This means that early representation can have a critical impact on whether and for how long defendants are incarcerated. Finally, during this time lawyers can help their clients get in contact with family members, bosses, and landlords to arrange for childcare, time off, and rent payments. If these needs aren’t dealt with, a defendant’s life can be seriously impacted, even beyond the direct effect of a criminal trial.
Good Call seeks to equalize access to early representation by providing a 24/7 hotline with an easily memorizable number (1-833-3-GOODCALL) that puts callers in contact with a defense lawyer for free as soon as they are arrested. The organization also offers people the ability to file emergency contacts ahead of time, who are then contacted once Good Call is informed of an arrest, and advocate for fair and equitable policing policies with local and state political representatives.
Rebecca Hicke
The Project
My job this summer was to help Good Call analyze New York City’s arrest data. Our goal was to form an understanding of policing culture in NYC and how it affects communities, particularly low income, minority neighborhoods. The arrest dataset, which is available on the site NYC Open Data, is a valuable resource for studying policing in NYC and identifying disproportionately affected neighborhoods. However, it is difficult to parse without independent analysis, and doesn’t include several key pieces of information, such as the district in which an arrest took place. I was able to overcome these data limitations and supplement the analysis with census demographic information about each neighborhood, such as the mean income and immigrant population.
My work this summer focused on designing several programs to provide Good Call with an easily maintainable method for studying the arrest data. The first set of programs cleans and processes newly released arrest data and adds it to the existing database. Another piece of code determines the number of arrests and % change in arrests by quarter or year for each district and produces several visualizations demonstrating how arrest rates have changed since 2006. The final set of programs produces comprehensive information on the arrests and demographics of a particular neighborhood, which facilitates an in-depth exploration of differences between neighborhoods.
Impact and Path Forward
There are several ways in which I hope this work will be impactful. On the individual level, making this data analysis publicly available will provide an opportunity for citizens to educate themselves about the effects of policing on their neighborhood and surrounding communities and advocate for changes they want to see. Organizations, including Good Call, will also be able to use this information to target outreach and resources more effectively to neighborhoods in need. Having specific statistics and visualizations available will also help them advocate for legislative changes and fundraise. Lastly, this data will allow stakeholders such as legislators to see how arrests affect their districts and constituents, and thus hopefully encourage them to argue for more fair and equitable policies.
