This should be controversial: As part of a mapping contest at UC Berkeley, some urban planning students at UCLA created a sophisticated interactive map showing incidences of various kinds of quality-of-life crimes in San Francisco, as well as a 10-year history of officer-involved shootings, showing where and when they happened.
The mapping contest itself was called "See-Through Maps," and had to do with maps that bore a point of view. This map, dubbed Home.Land.Security., obviously has an anti-law-enforcement point of view, but the map-makers explain it thusly:
Home.Land.Security. was designed to represent unsafe, threatening, and harmful spaces as experienced by the most vulnerable communities. We were moved by the murders of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant and many other cases of physical and emotional violence against people from marginalized communities. While many communities have a good relationship with law enforcement, for many others - including people of color, queer folks, and undocumented immigrants - police presence is itself a threat. We found many websites mapping crime data provided by police departments, but none mapping how safe different places might be for society’s most vulnerable people...
As the Atlantic's Cities blog notes, the map indicates the enforcement of quality-of-life crimes in order to suggest neighborhoods where the most police harassment may exist. Click around the thing and you can bring up arrests for narcotics, sex work, and disturbing the peace in your neighborhood. And, not surprisingly, the most dangerous place for these vulnerable communities is Civic Center and the Tenderloin, with by far the most arrests and a high number of officer-involved shootings between 2000 and 2011. Potrero Hill is pretty high up there too, with an even higher number of shootings by cops.
Helpful tip: When entering your address, make sure to put in your whole address with the city (S.F. only), or else the map will bounce you elsewhere.
Say what you will, it's kind of fascinating.
