Data: City of Chicago Data Portal - dssg/streetlights-crime GitHub Wiki

Our study uses data from the City of Chicago Data Portal which contains a variety of government datasets for Chicago. The Data Portal presents an opportunity to study questions facing cities in a way that these questions could not have been studied before.

In particular, we use:

Crimes - 2001 to present

311 Service Requests - Alley Lights Out

311 Service Requests - Street Lights - One Out

311 Service Requests - Street Lights - All Out

The crimes dataset includes geographic information, the crime type, and a location description (e.g., street, sidewalk, alley) for each crime. We only study crimes with outdoor locations descriptions as they may plausibly be impacted by alley or street light outages. The crime types we focus on are narcotics, theft, battery, criminal damage, motor vehicle theft, robbery, assault, burglary, and homicide.

The outage datasets contain geographic information and a date range for each outage. We focus on outages that started after April 1, 2012, as improvements were made to CDOT's documentation of Call Service Requests around that time.