Strange day

The ebb and flow of policing in Lincoln has a strong temporal pattern. The demand for police services ramps up in the late afternoon,  peaking with the evening rush hour, then cools in the evening. Around midnight it takes another uptick, until shortly after the bars close at 2:00 AM, and then begins sliding to it's low point around 5:00 AM.

When I first wrote about this back in the beginning of my blogging career, the bars closed at 1:00 AM, so the second peak was a bit earlier, and also a bit steeper.

This morning, I noticed that yesterday's pattern was quite different. Here's what it looked like for Monday, August 24, 2015:

There's no obvious cause to the peak between 8:00 and 9:00 AM, there were just a lot of unrelated calls. The same is true for the spike between 3:00 and 4:00 PM (1500-1600 hours.) Again, it is composed of a variety of unrelated calls with no apparent connection. The lack of a larger rush hour peak is unusual. By comparison, here is the previous Monday, August 17, 2015:

While the unusual pattern yesterday caught my attention, what's really interesting to me is the difference between the 2007 pattern (linked above) and the 2015 pattern. Essentially, the huge bar break peak we were experiencing a decade ago has moderated. It's still plenty busy, but does not compare to the evening rush hour in terms of sheer volume.