Innovative Ways to Visualize Incidents And Case Flows In The Criminal-Legal System

• In Event: Visualizations and Platforms Facilitating Public Safety

Abstract

This paper offers an innovative way to visualize the flow of reported incidents, police arrests and cases throughout the criminal-legal system. In the past, information about incident and case flows were represented through diagrams, such as funnel charts that are manually-produced with designing tools. These charts are often more illustrative than data informative and difficult to update. Within the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, we addressed these shortcomings with automated Sankey diagrams. A Sankey diagram is a scientific chart type that shows the flow of data at different stages where at each stage, categories at each node are ordered from the largest to the smallest, the length of categories are proportional to their number and connections between categories show where incidents and cases flow to. Our diagrams are built in R and can be created directly from raw data, therefore avoiding manual data entry errors. Further, the functions automatically add titles, subtitles, captions, and labels to the plots so that it is clear what is being depicted. With narratives that walk people through Sankey charts, the outcomes of adopting theses charts have been more effective communications that allow stakeholders to catch information of interest more easily.

Author

• Juncheng Liu, Philadelphia District Attorney's Office