Park Safety in St. Louis County
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Transcript of Park Safety in St. Louis County
Park SafetyAnalyzing Safety around St. Louis County Public Parks
Based on Crime and Population Density
By: Bradley Lewis Date: April 25, 2013
References:
Donahue, Ryan. “Pedestrians and Park Planning: How Far Will People Walk?”
http://cityparksblog.org/2011/05/13/pedestrians-and-park-planning-how-far-will-people-walk/.
Accessed April 23, 2013.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Crime in the U.S. 2010: Caution Against Ranking.”
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/caution-against-
ranking. Accessed April 22, 2013.
Gerken, Jim. Operations Manager for St. Louis County Public Parks.
Lord-Castillo, Brett. GIS Programmer for St. Louis County Emergency Management.
Markman, Joshua, Nancy G. La Vigne, and Samantha S. Lowry. “Evaluating the Use of Public
Surveillance Cameras for Crime Control and Prevention. September
2011.http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/Publications/e071112381_EvalPublicSurveillance.pdf. Accessed
April 23, 2013.
The National Recreation and Park Association. “Creating Safe Park Environments to Enhance
Community Wellness.”
http://www.nrpa.org/uploadedFiles/nrpaorg/Grants_and_Partners/Recreation_and_Health/Resou
rces/Issue_Briefs/Park-Safety.pdf. Accessed April 23, 2013.
Civic Problem Parks are supposed to be a place to relax and
enjoy the outdoors. However, are the parks we go
to safe? Crimes are occuring in and around St.
Louis County public parks. To make parks safer,
we have to know where the crimes are happening,
what they are, and how to make the parks safer.
Solution
I want to create a workflow that pinpoints the
parks with the most surrounding crime and
specific type of crime. My main product will be a
spreadsheet that shows the names of the St. Louis
County parks with corresponding crime and
population data.
This data can then be assessed and analyzed by
community planners, law enforcement, and park
managers to promote and develop safety
measures in and around parks with a high
density of crimes.
Results and Analysis The total crime map shows that many of the parks in the
northeastern area of the county had more crime occur in or near
the park than the central and west central parts of the county.
Advice
Consider the type of of crime to examine.
After assessing the data and map products,
prioritize which parks to allocate resources to.
(Some may include Castle Point, Spanish
Lake, Bella Fontaine, and Lemay.)
Survey and examine these areas around the
parks. Look for reasons crime may occur in
these parks. Do they have lights? What kind of
facilities and programs do they have? Is there
a school or police station nearby? Are there
cameras? Fill out a detailed “inventory” form
when doing this examination. (St. Louis
County has no cameras and no or only one
dusk to dawn light in the parks in the
spreadsheet below.)
Based on the inventory form and which parks
you want to center in on, focus budgets on
adding facilities to bring the community
together. Extend and implement community
programming and the hours of park operation
(with current or added LED lights) by having
professionally supervised recreation
programs.
Cameras can be added, but do cost more and
need to be monitored by trained professionals
and integrated with other policing functions.
Cameras may displace or avert crime from the
parks, but police officials can identify the
areas susceptible to crime displacement and
place officers in these locations.
Workflow and Methodology
Selected only parks with names in St.
Louis County (total of 68 records).
Selected layers based on type of
crime: Crimes Against Persons,
Crimes Against Property, and Quality
of Life Crimes, and exported them as
feature classes.
Spatially joined the parks and census
block data, and then the three crime
data features based on a 0.5 mile
search radius.
Added fields and calculated based on
type of crime divided by population
data.
Exported to .dbf file and then saved it
as an excel file to edit and clean the
data.
Park_Name Castle_Point Lemay Spanish_Lake Bella_Fontaine
C_A_Persons 467 202 573 1729
C_A_Property 1175 672 1619 5335
QOL_Crimes 469 350 390 2608
Total_Pop 3016 2726 6948 15622
TotalCrimes 2111 1224 2582 9672
CAPerson_ByPop 0.155 0.074 0.082 0.111
CAProperty_ByPop 0.390 0.247 0.230 0.342
QOL_ByPop 0.156 0.128 0.056 0.167
TotalCrimes_ByPop 0.700 0.449 0.372 0.619