Building Together: City of Memphis Weekly Newsletter

Memphis sent this bulletin at 05/17/2024 04:45 PM CDT

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As you know, our administration has been focused on creating a safer, stronger, more investable community. We believe that changing the course for our city is possible, and we believe a holistic strategy is key to long-term results. We also believe that data is needed to help guide our efforts and to ensure that you are seeing the results needed to create the Memphis we all deserve.

Our crime plan prioritizes Cameras, Curfews, Code Zero, Criminal Activity Disruption, and Controlling the Roads.

Cameras: In our FY25 budget, we have included $2.5M for the installation of a city-wide camera-mesh network that will aid our MPD officers in identifying criminal activity.
Curfew: The law already exists - the curfew for minors between the ages of 17 and 18 is 11pm on weekdays and 12am on weekends. For anyone under the age of 16, it's 10 pm during the week and 11pm on weekends.
Code Zero: We will continue our Code Zero suppression and intervention efforts in key neighborhoods on a rolling basis.
Criminal Activity Disruption: The majority of our violent crime is being committed by a small number of offenders. Using data, we will identify the repeat offenders committing these violent crimes and disrupt criminal activity and networks.
Controlling the Roadways: Our MPD and TN Highway Patrol officers will strictly enforce the laws related to reckless driving throughout our community. That means excessive speeding, dangerous driving, and fraudulent tag displays.

We will continue to maximize our coordinated and collaborative efforts with our community partners and track the data to map our progress.

This week, we are unveiling two important components in our data analysis efforts. In partnership with the Memphis Police Department (MPD), the city of Memphis has created a Safer Community dashboard page (launching on Monday - you are getting a sneak peek here!). We are starting with two dashboards - the Weekly Crime Trend Report and the Crime Analytics Dashboard - both utilizing MPD data. We also intend to add data from the courts, the DA, and other community partners as available.

The Weekly Crime Trend dashboard tracks our progress toward our annual goal of reducing crime by 10% by focusing on our week-over-week progress, while the Crime Analytics Dashboard takes a deeper look at crime stats and trends over the past five years. Each interactive dashboard includes key metrics and data that is updated daily or as new data is available. The Crime Analytics dashboard has various ways to slice/filter the data.

The city of Memphis believes in transparency and the power of using data to help drive our efforts to create a safer, stronger Memphis. I hope you will see this information as our commitment to you, the residents of our city, to keep our eyes on the metrics that matter.

Below is a guide to the dashboard components. The Weekly Crime Trend report can be found here. And the Crime Analytics dashboards can be accessed here.

Weekly Crime Trend

The report below provides a weekly update on Part 1 Crimes. It will update daily and show a continuous rolling 7-day total compared to the prior 7-day total. The date range for each 7-day period is shown below the table. The charts on the right show the calendar week trend, comparing 2023 to 2024.

Crime Analytics Dashboard How to Guide

Welcome to the City of Memphis Crime Analytics Dashboard! This dashboard provides details on what, where, and when crimes are committed. The dashboard contains data beginning January 1, 2019, and is updated daily with yesterday’s data. The dashboard is interactive, meaning you can use the “slicers” at the top of the page to filter the visuals. Read on for more information about the dashboard’s components and interactions! The dashboard can be accessed here.

Overview
An offense is classified into 3 levels: crime type, crime category, and crime against, based on the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) definitions. For example, the crime of murder is in the category of homicide offenses, which are in the crimes against people category. This dashboard shows all Group A crime types.

View Summary
Clicking this button will direct you to the summary page of Part 1 crimes this year compared to last year. Use the back arrow on the top right of the page to navigate back to the dashboard homepage.

Slicers
Slicers are used to filter the data. On this dashboard, you can filter the visuals by year, crime category, Part One/Two designation, Precinct, or all the above! You can also select options from multiple slicers at once (maybe you want to see the total homicides in 2023 in the Crump precinct). For all slicers except Year, you can select multiple options within each slicer by holding the “ctrl” button while you select (maybe you want to see homicides and robberies in 2023 in the Crump precinct). To clear your filters, hover over the right-hand corner of the slicer box and click the eraser icon that appears.

Tooltips
A tooltip is a pop-up that appears when you hover a visualization. Likewise, anywhere you see an “i” icon, you can hover over it to see more information. Most of the visuals on the dashboard have a tooltip that will provide more information, including a comparison to last year and/or crime type definitions. When the Year slicer is set to the current year, the metric calculations are made on a year-to-date basis, defined as January 1 of the current year through yesterday. When a previous year is selected in the year slicer, the metric calculations will show data for the complete calendar year.

Here's an example of how year-to-date calculations work: if today is June 15, 2024, our year-over-year calculation will show the percent change between January 1, 2024, and June 14, 2024, compared to January 1, 2023, through June 14, 2023.