Category Archives: DataViz

United Kingdom Drug Maps 2015 – 2018

A look into drug enforcement in the land of Oy m8s and Jaffa Cakes. The United Kingdom.

The data is from data.police.uk The time range parsed for the street level crime of drugs was 2015 through 2018

Click on maps below to enlarge


United Kingdom population density seen through the use of Illegal Drugs.


“The Government’s organised crime strategy sets out that drug trafficking to the UK costs an estimated £10.7 billion per year.”


“Class A drugs, specifically heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine and ecstasy, are widely available throughout the UK.”


“NCA seized 69.8 tonnes of cocaine, 4.5 tonnes heroin, 16.3 tonnes opium, 123.1 tonnes cannabis in their first year of operation”


“The amount of heroin estimated to be imported annually into the UK is between 18-23 tonnes. The vast majority of this is derived from Afghan opium.”

Quotes from National Crime Agency (NCA)
Old post which goes into more technical detail of how the data was parsed using c#.

Bonus map

Chicago narcotics solicitations in public-ways; incident maps

Where will you be offered narcotics in Chicago? Or, where do cops go to do undercover busts.

Crime incident reports are gathered by the Chicago Police Department. The time range spans from 2001 through 2018. The data is from data.cityofchicago.org.

Incident descriptors used:
NARCOTICS – Primary Type
SOLICIT NARCOTICS ON PUBLICWAY – Description

A decline in publicway narcotic solicitations or enforcement can be noticed around 2008.

Chicago’s Prostitution Decline 2001 – 2017 (revisited)

Visualizing the decline of Chicago prostitution from the eyes of the police department. The time range used spans from 2001 through 2017. The data was filtered from data.cityofchicago.org. Below is a Torque/Geo Temporal Map which animates over time using 67,690 total incident reports, each report with a primary crime type of prostitution. Beneath that is a cumulative heat map. And lastly, a map created attempting to show the migration of enforcement over years.

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Previous visualization from 2 years ago