Anger in response to the lack of indictment of two white police officers responsible for killing two unarmed black men should not be over-particularized. Without diminishing their lives, these men are symptomatic of larger trends in this country: minority populations are severely overrepresented in our country’s prisons. It is our obligation to society to examine why this is, to look at unpleasant truths, and ultimately, to begin to reconcile our past with the future.
I propose to map and critically analyze crime statistics in Portland, Maine. With any luck, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I will be able to sort and geocode a dataset of all the crimes committed in the past year, along with detailed breakdowns of the type of crime and the identity of the accused. I will map this against the background of recent Portland census data on racial and economic makeup of areas where crimes occur and, if possible, the areas from which the accused criminals hail.*
The empirical will be accompanied by a theoretical consideration of factors that effect crime. Discussions of how, in the days following Michael Brown’s killing, authorities tried to slander his character offer a jumping-off point. To what extent must we pin crimes on the perpetrators as competent moral agents? How much (and how) should we weigh socioeconomic background in the equation? Ultimately, though, the questions that matter most to the everyday lives of Portlanders involve how we can better police the streets, and, further, how to redress the root causes of inequity, even injustice. Specifically, I will engage with the work of Dolores Hayden to dissect the complex and subtle ways in which power is exerted in space in a formative manner. I would like to read Sue Ruddick’s “Constructing Differences in Public Spaces: Race, Class and Gender as Interlocking Systems.”
The model for my mapping will be the Million Dollar Block Project produced by Columbia’s Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL). The project’s fundamental thesis shifts focus on crime from the location of the events. Such focus leads to heavier policing of “hotspots” but this framework for crime prevention has not done enough to halt crime and has instead resulted in an astronomical incarceration rate. Instead, SIDL seeks to map residencies of criminals in an effort to reveal how we as a society have failed to provide the proper infrastructure to impoverished communities—infrastructure that keeps them out of prisons.[1]
An analysis of crime, race, and socioeconomics in this country can never be free from controversy—we have too long and too ugly a history with the words to produce anything else. Critical mapping and data visualization offers a sophisticated way to consider such data, one that is both digestible and informative. Policymakers and Portland residents alike would benefit from better data about crime, and hopefully it could inspire difficult discussions about the common good.
*Because of the sensitive nature of the data and the potential home location information, I am not certain that this data should be made publically available (at least not in full).
[1] Cadora, Eric and Kurgan, Laura, “Million Dollar Block Project,” Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University. http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdfs/PDF_04.pdf