There have been a lot of statistics thrown around about the New York City Police Department’s controversial “stop, question and frisk” practices. Various reports, speeches and news stories have focused on specific percentages: 53 percent of the people stopped by the NYPD in 2012 were black, 89 percent were innocent, 0.5 percent resulted in an arrest. But it’s hard to understand the whole picture from these numbers.
This new interactive visualization of all the data related to stop-and-frisk policing in 2012 does a great job of fixing that. Thomas Rhiel of the independent news site BKLYNR came up with an interesting way to explore the issue called “All the Stops.”
Maybe this isn’t a map in the strictest sense, and not an obvious post for Map Lab, but it’s the spatial arrangement of the data that interests me. Something about laying it out graphically like this, with each category as a group of dots (each representing 1,000 stops), as opposed to listing particular numbers or lining up a bunch of pie charts, makes things more clear. The precise numbers aren’t there, but a sense of the whole picture is — and that’s what’s usually missing.
One really neat aspect of this treatment is that the dots aren’t just representing an arbitrary 1,000 stops in each category. They represent specific groups of stops. So, if you are looking at the outcomes of the stops you can see that very few of them resulted in contraband being found. If you then click over to see how many weapons were found, the dots that were in the “contraband found” group all move over into the “no weapon found group,” while a different group of dots comes out of the “no contraband found” group to form the “weapon found” group.
In other words, the stops that turned up contraband were not the same stops that turned up weapons. It’s another level of information that would be really awkward to try to show that with pie charts.
For me, representing the stops with dots like this — even though each one is 1,000 stops — makes it feel more like we are talking about actual, individual people. Percentages don’t do that.
Images: Thomas Rheil/BKLYNRGo Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.