Saturday, April 9, 2016

Peak erodes to mound

One morning last summer I was looking at the overnight police activity (as usual), and noticed what appeared to be an unusual day, in that police dispatches had been low during the wee hours of the  morning when I would have expected to see a spike. There's always been a peak around the time bars are closing and people who have been drinking are heading out. It's not much of a peak anymore: it's eroded to a mere mound.

The smoothing of the curve I noticed in August is not an anomaly: there has been a change, and a big one. The following two charts demonstrate the change. These temporal heat charts, organized by day of week in the columns and hour of day in the rows, show the relative volume of police dispatches during the 168 one hour weekly time slots. Colors are assigned by standard deviation breaks. Dark red means a very high peak compared to the mean, deep blue means a very low hour. The top chart is for the year ending March 31, 2016. the bottom one covers calendar year 2007, the year my blog started.


The change evident from these charts is striking. The row totals reveal the significance of the change, particularly if you consider that Lincoln's population (of both people and liquor licenses) has increased significantly in the past nine years. Bar break just isn't quite what it used to be, and that's a good thing.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

B6-030096 - This was pretty much what gut instinct tells me it was, wasn't it? You know what I mean.

Anonymous said...

Thunderbird Ln deck fire -was it caused by improper disposal of smoking materials?

Tom Casady said...

9:32,

Don't know right now (too early), but what do you suppose the odds are? 80%?

Anonymous said...

Older teens or boomerang (young adult) kids living there probably boosted that to 90% or higher. I think that's what torched your neighbor's house, wasn't it?

Anonymous said...

Plastic flower pot, again, speaking of your fire next door. Nobody buys clay pots anymore?

Anonymous said...

How about this 61st & Havelock area fire?

"Smoke and fire damage could be seen on a porch/roof area"

Improper disposal of smoking materials again? Either that or a grill within 10 feet of a multiunit (3 or more) residential building. Anytime I hear about a fire on a porch, deck, etc I always think of how prohibitively expensive a galvanized steel bucket and a bag of sand would be. Yeah, you have to empty it and put new sand in now and then. It's such a bother.

Let's see, 10 bucks - or a burned-out building. What a tough choice.

Tom Casady said...

10:09,

That one was a grill, as I recall. Galvanized pail on my patio for ashes. Grandkids love it: "It's made out of metal!" Sort of in the same category as the window cranks on my old pickup.

Anonymous said...

Looks like it was a cig after all. Did they have a gas grill up there too; was that what went "Whoooooom"?

On a related note, perhaps you could post a photo of your cutting-edge, hi-tech galvanized cig fire prevention device, so that people can marvel at its complexity and shudder at the massive expense it would surely take to purchase one... 8^D

Anonymous said...

Let's dust off this old Chief's Corner blog post, because it's quite timely:

How to prevent home invasion robbery

Everything old is new again!

Anonymous said...

B6-034644 - key left real handy, I imagine.

Anonymous said...

B6-034989 Burglary. I saw where it was geocoded and pulled that house up on the County Assessor page - and when I saw the photo of the house, it tripped a memory. Wasn't that the house where there was something like a "SWATTING" or other faked weapons in progress incident last year or the year before? Multiple LPD units showed up but it was all crickets there.

Maybe sometime after March 2015 (which is when it changed owners and became a rental property.