The Most Dangerous Districts of Dortmund
In this paper the districts of Dortmund, a big German city, are ranked concerning their level of risk to be involved in an offence. In order to measure this risk the offences reported by police press reports in the year 2011 (Presseportal, http://www.pres
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Abstract In this paper the districts of Dortmund, a big German city, are ranked concerning their level of risk to be involved in an offence. In order to measure this risk the offences reported by police press reports in the year 2011 (Presseportal, http://www.presseportal.de/polizeipresse/pm/4971/polizeidortmund?start=0, 2011) were analyzed and weighted by their maximum penalty corresponding to the German criminal code. The resulting danger index was used to rank the districts. Moreover, the socio-demographic influences on the different offences are studied. The most probable influences appear to be traffic density (Sierau, Dortmunderinnen und Dortmunder unterwegs—Ergebnisse einer Befragung von Dortmunder Haushalten zu Mobilität und Mobilitätsverhalten, Ergebnisbericht, Dortmund-Agentur/Graphischer Betrieb Dortmund 09/2006, 2006) and the share of older people. Also, the inner city parts appear to be much more dangerous than the outskirts of the city of Dortmund. However, can these results be trusted? Following the press office of Dortmund’s police, offences might not be uniformly reported by the districts to the office and small offences like pickpocketing are never reported in police press reports. Therefore, this case could also be an example how an unsystematic press policy may cause an unintended bias in the public perception and media awareness.
T. Beige () C. Weihs Chair of Computational Statistics, TU Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] T. Terhorst H. Wormer Institute of Journalism, TU Dortmund, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. Spiliopoulou et al. (eds.), Data Analysis, Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery, Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01595-8__2, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
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1 Introduction The paper is the result of a project together with data journalists, who were particularly interested in the prejudice of some citizens of Dortmund that the district Innenstadt Nord is especially dangerous. To find an answer to this question some methodological problems have to be overcome such as how danger can actually be measured. Section 2 gives information about the used response variables. In Sect. 3 different influential factors on danger in a district are discussed as well as outcomes of regression models. Finally, the development and analysis of a danger index is presented in Sect. 4.
2 Responses How can danger be measured? This project deals with different types of offences. It is based on a data set which is created by the Dortmund police press releases of the year 2011 (see www.presseportal.de). In our case, incidents or non-crime reports such as demonstrations, announcements, public relations and similar press reports are not considered. Overall, 1,053 press releases are cataloged. Each data row or rather each offence contains several variables. The variable offence specifies the type of offence. This nominally scaled variab
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