Problem: Why Study Outages and Crime? - dssg/streetlights-crime GitHub Wiki

As city departments make decisions about how to allocate their resources to best serve city residents, it is important for the departments to be able to measure the impact of their work upon residents. Recently, many cities, including Chicago, have made efforts to make their data available to the public. The growing amounts of city data available present new opportunities to estimate the impacts of city programs.

This project uses City of Chicago data to study an important question for department planning. The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), whose responsibilities include repairing alley and street lights outages, hypothesized that alley and street light outages may be associated with higher crime rates.

CDOT asked us to investigate the relationship between outages and crime using city data sources. If a connection were found, then CDOT might conclude that repairing alley and street lights more quickly could result in reducing crime. Further, by examining results in geographic detail, CDOT can determine in which areas of the city would quicker repair of outages be most helpful with reducing crime.