The Providence Geocoded Crime Incidents is a geodataset created by the Brown University Library GeoData@SciLi team for the mapping of crimes by location and type over time. It is derived from the Providence Police Case Log, updated nightly with the past 180 days of crime incidents in Providence, Rhode Island. The purpose of this project is to create annual data archives of geocoded crime incidents. The locations of incidents in this project are general approximations, and do not represent the precise locations where crimes occurred.
Incidents were plotted to: the mid-point of a range of addresses in a block, the intersection of two streets, or the center of a large landmark. Coordinates were derived from three sources: RIGIS's E911 point layer, the RIDOT geocoder, and Open Street Map. The coordinate source is determined by the format of the location attribute in the original dataset: block number, intersection, or landmark. Locations which do not fall into these categories, such as standalone street names, were not geocoded due to their imprecise nature. Successfully geocoded results are stored as a point layer (pvd_geocoded_[year].shp) in the Rhode Island State Plane (ft-US) coordinate system, EPSG 3438. Geocoded results are also available in CSV format (pvd_geocoded_[year].csv), with 'latitude' and 'longitude' columns in WGS 84 (EPSG 4326). Cases which could not be accurately geocoded are stored in pvd_non_geocoded_[year].csv. Output files are available separately by year. In addition to these output files, this repository includes metadata in the OSM Aardvark standard, documentation, and the Python script for generating the results.
Project lead: Felicity Hade, DSI Undergraduate Fellow, Brown University '24
The dataset and associated documentation are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License CC BY-NC-SA. You are free to share and to adapt the work as long as you cite the source, do not use it for commercial purposes, and release adaptations under the same license.
Disclaimer: Every effort was made to insure that the data, which was compiled from public sources, was processed and presented accurately. The creators and Brown University disclaim any liability for errors, inaccuracies, or omissions that may be contained therein or for any damages that may arise from the foregoing. Users should independently verify the accuracy and fitness of the data for their purposes.
Data files are stored in the outputs directory. Open the all folder to find data across all years beginning in 2023, or open a specific year to download more annual results. Files can be downloaded individually or all together as a zip file for completed years.
Completed years:
To run the Jupyter notebook to generate your own output, first dowload RIGIS's E-911 dataset and move the entire FACILITY_SITES_E911 shapefile (all the individual pieces) into the code>inputs directory (this file is too large to upload to GitHub).
