At this point it’s pretty well-established that the pandemic has had a tremendous impact on human life around the world and particularly within New York City’s five boroughs. At the time of this post, over 10% of the USA’s 209K+ deaths have come from NYC alone (23,852). The death-toll from the pandemic is staggering on its own - and continues to shock in its reach - but the addition of the shutdown (and continued restrictions - even in Phase 4 of the reopening) has had a compounding effect on all aspects of socioeconomic activity in the city.

Today’s post builds upon some of the work from a previous post to include historic and year-to-date Arrest and Summonses counts by NYPD precinct. The aim is to use visualization (plotly, primarily) to explore the impact of policy changes on racial equity over time. Data Historic and Year-to-Date information from NYC’s OpenData API for NYPD Arrests and Summonses related to Article 221 of the New York Penal Law (PL221) from 2009-07-01 through 2019-06-30 (10-years of data).

I had some time this past weekend so I created a Dash App to deploy on Heroku as part of this website portfolio. I’ve created visualizations in plotly using both R and Python but I wanted to show off my Dash skills with a relatively simple application that I could walk through in a short amount of time. Here’s a screen-cap preview: Screen capture of Gas App hosted on Heroku

I recently tried out plot.ly’s open source graphing library and found it to be challenging but worth the effort. Challenging, in that the documentation has some gaps but worth it in that the features of the standard plots are responsive (via .js) and feature-rich right out of the box. I tried out both python and R versions of plot.ly and I found the R version to be the most straight-forward to use and deploy via shinyapps.