You can find below notes about the development of the project, along with the tools I used and a example of code for the queries in use.
- Where did I get the information of the logs?
The police log is publicly available at the Lawrence, MA Police department website. www.lapwd.com - The process consisted in:
- External process:
- Opening a log PDF file with Adobe Acrobat (not Reader). Then exported the contents to a text file.
- I used Notepad++ to clean the exported files, and made a simple macro in order to fix columns and rows.
- I repeated the process for all the days of the month, then I created one single file with all the log entries.
- I created a file with three months, representing a quarter of the year.
- I made a program in C# in Visual Studio 2015 that reads the content of the file of the quarter and created a comma delimited version of it.
- In ArcGIS:
- I logged into ArcGIS Online and used the Geolocation service with the file.
- Because each trimester included more than 16,000 entries I had to split it in categories using Selection by Attribute in ArcGIS.
In order to avoid locations that could not be matched or inaccurate, I used this query selection:“Field3” LIKE ‘%NOISE%’ AND x<>0 AND Match_addr<>’Lawrence, Massachusetts’ AND (“Addr_type” <> ‘StreetInt’ AND “Addr_type” <> ‘StreetName’) AND “Score” = 100
This way, I avoided locations where the coordinates are empty or simple street addresses.
- I created a new layer out from the selection. Later I converted the layer to a shapefile using the toolbox of ArcGIS.
- I compressed the components of the shapefile into one single ZIP file.
- In ArcGIS online:
- I made a Story Map based on the Story Map Series template, with tabs, for each quarter of 2016. I incorporated the categories in each tab and chose the display mode of heat map.
- Because the fourth quarter of 2016 is incomplete and only has one month, I chose the Story Map Basic template to represent all the events of the month of October.
Imagery is publicly available from the city of Lawrence website, except the thumbnail and background pictures of the the third and fourth quarters, they are from my personal collection.