Doug McCune tok publicly available crime data for San Francisco 2009 and extruded it into 3 dimensions like a heightfield, and mapped it onto some pretty textured maps of the city. The result is some interesting visuals that create a type of “crime topology” of the city with some interesting results.
I love how some of the features in these maps are pretty consistent across all the crime types, like the mountain ridge along Mission St., and how some of the features only crop up in one or two of the maps. The most unique map by far is the one for prostitution (more on that further down).
