The Northern Star has launched a crime map to visualize where crime happens around NIU’s campus.
The NIU Police Department releases a daily crime log with crimes that have been reported each day. The crime logs include cases that are newly reported each day and cases that have been updated with status changes or additional charges that have been made to police cases.
However, the NIU Police Department’s crime log only allows students to view crime logs for each day as a pdf file and does not allow the ability to search by factors other than a specific date or to see reported crimes on a map.
The Northern Star created an application to visualize campus crimes. The application downloads crime logs from the NIU Department of Police and Public Safety’s website, scrapes data from the pdfs and organizes the information into a structured data table. The application codes location data using the Google Maps API by searching for addresses that are included in the crime log pdfs.
Due to the difficulty in scraping data from pdfs, for now, a small amount of manual data cleaning is required.
The map will be updated every 30 days to reflect the crimes that happened every month and will be published with every monthly crime log story.
The Northern Star has chosen not to include incidents related to sexual assault and domestic violence in its crime map to avoid creating an environment that discourages students from reporting those incidents.
