The battle against graffiti is never-ending in Chicago.
Graffiti is vandalism. It scars the community, lowers property values and diminishes residents’ quality of life. The Department of Streets and Sanitation provides free service for private property owners to remove graffiti upon 311 requests. The graffiti removal program is regarded as a model for other cities. Indeed, in the recent five years, annual total graffiti incidents decreased moderately to 116,096 per year and average response time plummeted to less than one day. However, the efficiency improvement is inevitably costly. Annual spending on the program kept growing and soared to over $ 4.8 million in 2016.
It is worthwhile taking a closer look at graffiti incidents in the city.
This interactive visualization project aims to analyze trends and patterns of graffiti removal requests from 2012 to 2016. The Community Comparison Map examines the graffiti density vs removal time at community level. The Recurring Graffiti Map details locations with most recurring graffiti incidents over the years. Together they provide a panorama of the distribution and concentration of graffiti, and reveal persistent patterns of graffiti incidents in the City of Chicago.
Welcome to check out my static visualization portfolio on Chicago graffiti here.
Data Source:
City of Chicago Data Portal - 311 Service Requests - Graffiti Removal
American Community Survey
View code on Github