Using Power BI to Visualize Houston Crime Stats

Houston Crime Data

The city of Houston provides high level details on crime statistics via Excel files on the police website.  These statistics are stored in monthly files available via Excel or Access.  In order to better understand the crime data I created a single Excel file that stored the data from August 2016 to December 2016.  The data is formatted as shown.  I wanted to see what type of information I could learn by using Power BI to Visualize the data.

Using Power BI to Visualize the Data

Connect to the data in Power BI directly to the Excel file.  To explore summary information build simple data grids that expose the total number of records grouped by hour and date totalling 53,614 offenses.   You should expect to see 24 values for the Hour column and only records from August to December 2016.  By reviewing the data, the hour data looks good, however, the date has unexpected values.  There are dates from 2015 back to 1918.  Those records need to be investigated to determine why they are in the actual data.  For now, they will be included in the next steps.

Now visualize the data by looking at when, where and what kind of crimes are taking place.  To do this, I created a Power BI page that shows Number of offenses by Hour, Number of Offenses by Type of Offense, Number of Offenses by Day_of_Week.

Now it is easy to see the most crimes take place between 3-4 PM on Fridays.  By added a few more data grids, you can see the breakout of offenses by month, Street Name and type of Premise.

Now I can easily see the Street and Block Range and type of Premise that have the most offenses.  Using this information you can see the areas of the city that have the most reported crimes.  By taking this simple spreadsheet data, using Power BI you can covert your data to information.

How can you leverage Power BI at your organization to convert you data to information and help improve operations?

 

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