NYC Social Distancing Reports

  On March 22, 2020 NYC Mayor de Blasio issued COVID-19 guidance to New Yorkers. All non-essential businesses in NYC will be closed, with exception to essential businesses, such as grocery stores, pharmacies, internet providers, food delivery, mass transit, banks, and financial institutions. As of 6:00PM on March 20, 2020 there were a reported 5,683 positive cases of COVID-19 and 43 fatalities. However, the businesses with essential functions that continue to operate must do so under these guidelines, in which the NYPD will help enforce these policies. The policy is as follows:

No non-essential gatherings; any concentration of people outside their home must be limited to workers providing essential services

• Practice social distancing in public (6 feet or more)
• Individuals should limit outdoor recreational activities to non-contact.
• Limit use of public transportation to only when absolutely necessary.
• Sick individuals should not leave home except to receive medical care.

Between the dates of March 01st, 2020 and July 31st, 2020, there have been a recorded number of 61,008 complaints that fall under the descriptor “Social Distancing”. These complaints are categorized by time created, borough, location type where the incident occurred, and the resolution that followed by either the NYPD or Department of Parks and Recreation.

Location types are categorized as follows:

• Park/Playground
• Residential Building/House
• Store/Commercial
• Street/Sidewalk

From the data shown, it’s clear that majority of reports were for Store/Commercial locations, given that there were a few that essential stores could be operating at that time. Even though the restrictions went into affect March 22, majority of the reports took place between April through June.

The graph here illustrates how each complaint was handled after the report, divided by borough. Majority of the complaints are categorized as “The Police Department responded to the complain and took action to fix the condition”, with about 9,219 of those reports being located in Brooklyn.

The second most popular categorization is “The Police Department responded to the complaint and with the information available observed no evidence of the violation at that time.” There have been a recorded 11 resolutions that resulted in the arrest due to a complaint.

The gradient of the squares slowly increase to a dark red, representing emergency and high-risk– very fitting during those months.

The graph explains the amount of reports over the five month period as a line graph, with each line color-coded by borough. It illustrates the increase of reports made over this period of time, and the decrease that follows after the month of May.

I decided to create the graph with a dark background in order to make the colors of the bars and lines pop out. The colors chosen are similar to the NYC Subway map, in my opinion, although I cannot guarantee if others get a similar impression.

Some limitations I encountered were trying to incorporate all 4 variables into a single graph: 1. Borough 2: Month 3: Location Type 4: Resolution Description. While trying to combine all 4, I felt the information got a little bit crowded, and it would be hard to the viewer to understand the visuals at hand. Another set of data I would have like to included would the populations of each borough. Number of reports in contrast to population of borough would be more telling; however I suppose that would be hard to find considering the number of deaths that occurred each day in NYC due to Coronavirus.

Ideally, I’d like to take this project further by incorporating the median income and racial groups of the borough, considering that social distancing is a privilege to those who have the luxury to work from home, or to move out of NYC into a new home or an already pre-existing home. However, I’m not sure what kind of data can be extracted from 311 on peoples socio-economic background, so I’d have to use another database. I’d mostly be interested in data of those who continued to work throughout the pandemic as front-line workers and how they dealt with the COVID risks due too the nature of their job or their situation at hand.