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NYC Graffiti Complaints Visualization

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About


The Graffiti-free NYC Program is the first full-time, street-by-street graffiti removal service initiated by NYCEDC in 1999 in the City of New York. The objectives of Graffiti-Free NYC are to provide no-cost graffiti removal for the City, to create jobs for low-to-moderate income residents, and to enhance overall neighborhood aesthetics.



This site takes the advantage of graffiti service requests data from 01/01/2004 to 12/31/2013 from NYC Open Data and provides a visualization of graffiti complaints using Leaflet, ArcGIS, CartoDB, Bootstrap, and dc.js.



Charts


Let's take a look at the total number of graffiti complaints by quarter, day of week, borough, status, clean institution, open/closed, location, and month.

There are slightly more complaints in quarter 2 (April, May, and June) than other three quarters. You can have a better sense of the yearly pattern with the monthly chart below. Meanwhile, more complaints arise on weekdays and in mixed use areas. Brooklyn outperforms the other four boroughs while Staten Island has the least complaints.

For number of complaints by quarters, boroughs, and status, we might be more confident to conclude that larger number of complaints means more graffiti created. For complaints by day of week, however, it may also result from people's tendency to complain on weekdays as opposed to weekends (if for properties near their workplace).

Explore and interact with the charts!


Quarters
Day of Week
Boroughs
Status


(Click to filter)
Clean Institutions
Open/Closed
Location




(Select a time range to zoom in)
Monthly Number of Graffiti Complaints


Choropleth


The neighborhoods with higher graffiti complaints are mainly located in lower Manhattan (Chinatown, East Village, SoHo, Lower East Side) and Washinton Heights, most places in Queens, Brooklyn and Bronx that are close to Manhattan (Bedford, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Hunters Point, Astoria, Mott Haven, Hunts Point, etc), and some other places in outer boroughs (Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Borough Park, East New York, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Jamaica, Westchester, etc).


By Neighborhood Tabulation Area

(Please hover over a neighborhood)




Time Series


The time series captures the created date of each graffiti complaint from January 2010 to March 2016. It shows a similar city-wide pattern as Choropleth maps above but with seasonal fluctuations.


(Control using the time slider)