With data analytics and BI, your job is to take data and produce meaning. Suppose you’ve been contracted by the Denver Police Department to help them find something in all their incident data. Let’s take a look and see if we can glean some insights from the information.
This graph breaks down the incidents by time of day, using a 24-hour clock. What do you notice? When are the most incidents? The least? When would it be best to have more officers out on shifts?
Think about these questions and problems for a bit. You’ll probably have some good ideas for the police chief already. When you’re ready, let’s continue and dive deeper into the data. Instead of looking at all incidents, let’s split it up based on crime and traffic data.
What’s different now? Before, it looked like crime tampered off after 18:00, but now we can see it was really traffic; crime continues to stay high until 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM. Now we can give the police chief even better information! He can let most of his traffic officers go home at night, but probably should beef up the night shift combating crime.
