The US has more guns per capita than anywhere else in the world. These days, we have been hearing news, and stories of shooting sprees in the United States. This makes me wonder – is violent crime really getting worse in America? With those thoughts, I happened to read an article which showed the 50 year trends in the violent crime in the United States. The article had the following chart which showcased the total number of violent crimes in the US from 1960 to 2009 and the overall trends throughout.
What did I like about this graph?
- The author wants the viewers to compare the number of incidents over the years. I can conclude that numbers are unstable and one can’t accurately make any predict for the upcoming years with this historical data.
- The graph encompasses a long-time span of 50 years which gives one a pretty decent idea of the crime history in the country.
How will I make it better?
Use of the right type of graph:
The bar graph used is surely giving a good picture of the changes in the crime numbers over the years. However, the use of a line graph would have served the same purpose and would also look neat. A line graph is commonly used to display change over time as a series of data points. Use of bars to cover such a big time frame seems unnecessary. Owing to this, the simple straight forward information is passed on in a somewhat cluttered manner.
I would make use of line graph instead to provide similar insights. Using a line graph, the same message can be conveyed by just a single line and does not look overwhelming.
Highlighting important years:
By studying the graph in a bit detail, it can be noticed that there are some periods – 1975, 1981, 1992 post which a continuous trend (increasing or decreasing) seems to change. For me, those points are noteworthy as I would like to drill down further and would be more interested to know what exactly must have happened that year which caused the trend to break. Hence if the graph had those years highlighted the readers would not have to struggle to mark those years.
Hence, I would mark such findings so it would catch one’s attention immediately and provide better insights. This reduces the task of the readers who are interested in finding specific patterns and wanting to explore more details.
Audience:
Giving a thought on which group of users would find this information the most useful, it would be perhaps the police department of the United states, the federal and state government and the law makers. So as described above, if the graph highlights the interesting patterns then perhaps that can be used by the government to take decisions related to the staffing of police. The police department may use it to study the crime history in a period say 1992 and introspect on their moves then and improvise their strategies from those take-aways. The law makers might use to check if there had been a specific rule or law being imposed which caused the trend to break.
Claim:
The bar graph does indeed impart a lot of information and the complete statistics. However, it does not have a claim as such. The first visualization in such a long article should better be very impressive as that’s the point where a reader decides whether to continue reading the article further or to just switch to something else!
For e.g. I notice that one of the take-aways from the graph is that the year 1992 was peak of the violent crimes. This could have been added in the form of a brief description or a statement on the top. By doing that, even the very first look at the graph provides a key insight. Also, it would invite more audience.
Improved Y axis:
Currently the Y axis has just 4 values being shown. It does give a fair idea of the number of crime incidents occurred each year. However, since the x axis is spread across around 50 years and that no two years have the same number of incidents happening, there is a room to spread the Y axis across more values.
I would start the Y axis with 0 and then increase it at shorter intervals until I reach 2000000. This gives the readers a better estimate of the actual count of the violent crimes for a specific year.
Aesthetics:
Using bright relevant colors and a bigger font would help reach out to a larger audience. The colors being used also play a role in engaging the viewers. To me, the grey color looks too dull and old.
I would use the red color. Red is a very emotionally intense color as it symbolizes fire and blood. Thus, using red to represent crime figures becomes apt. It helps in connecting well with the audience and inducing the right amount of seriousness in the minds of the readers.
Redesign: Below is my attempt to redesign the visualization to present my ideas based on the data collected from the source in the article. I have taken the dataset from website – The Disaster center which had the complete the data for crime from 1960 to 2009. I have also worked on the aesthetics to make the graphs neat and clean.
References:
Main article: https://lowtechcombat.com/blog/2010/12/50-year-trends-in-violent-crime-in-us
Crime Dataset: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/21/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/