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