In this post I look into Chicago Police Department’s enforcement of two particular narcotics report types: Heroin and Crack Cocaine. I was curious to see yearly migrations of CPD’s activity from 2003 to 2014 in the west side region of Chicago.

The Data is from City of Chicago Data Portal

Links to youtube video animated heatmaps (some mobile devices don’t support embedded videos on my site):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qGPhlBGWxQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh22pGBLgYo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czoofaWOAps

Monthly

Yearly

Ruby was used to parse the data and convert into JSON.
Google Heatmaps API was used to generate the maps.
Camtasia Studio 8 was used to annotate and export the videos.

Ruby written to create monthly maps