With two little kids in my house, I feel very unsafe whenever I hear Burglaries or Home Invasions around me. I did hear about a few of them in the past few weeks. Although we can earn money and valuable stuff again, the psychological stress an incident can create would be immense and leaves us with an indelible effect.

As I was thinking about it, my ‘Data’ mindset wanted to understand the reported numbers and wanted to check if there was a pattern for these incidents. Fortunately, Fort bend county police department uploads all reported criminal statistics to RAIDSONLINE database. It was pretty easy to filter the information based on type of crime and get more relevant data.

Burglaries at Residential Houses, Burglaries from Motor Vehicles and Motor Vehicle Thefts

I selected our community club house as center and queried for all crime incidents within 2 miles radius from the center. I then selected only Burglaries at Residential Houses, Burglaries from Motor Vehicles and Motor Vehicles Thefts as type of incidents happened between June 1st, 2015 to March 1st, 2016.

Observations from the Map:

1. Streets on which incidents related to motor vehicles ( either burglary or motor vehicle theft ) happened are near to Hwy 6.
2. Residential Burglaries are quite spread out. It is hard to identify a pattern. I will leave it to readers to identify any patterns.

Also, when I selected a few relevant incidents and put them on a spreadsheet, I could notice a few other things.

1. 6 out of 8 Residential House Burglaries happened in the PM hours. That’s a staggering 75%.
2. Day of Week Vs. No. Of Incidents {Mon:2, Tue:1, Wed:2, Fri:1, Sat:1, Sun:3}. It is interesting to see Sunday having highest number of incidents. But overall, data tells us that it can happen any day.
3. It scared the sh*t out of me to know that these miscreants can forcibly enter a residential house at 8:30 PM in the night (incident 3 from the top).
4. Until I looked this data set, I was unaware of the fact that there was occurrence of an incident very near to where I live. Thanks to the database.

My intention is not to create a panic by bringing out these statistics. I wish we have a silver bullet or a magic wand that can help us predict and prevent the next possible crime. But that’s unrealistic. The only thing we can do is be aware of what happened and take necessary precautions to possibly prevent the next incident.