There are thousands of us living in New York City and millions of tourists who come to visit New York every year, every week, and every day. Nearly 67 million tourists have visited New York City for the summer of 2019, according to the latest estimate from NYC & Company, the city’s tourism marketing agency. Everyone enjoys the streets of NYC, however, beautiful sights, the tallest skyscrapers, and crowded streets can easily take away our attention from our own belongings. Unfortunately, no one is safe from losing items or becoming a victim of theft.
I decided to look at the Lost & Found Data from 311 Service Requests and find out where and when we should pay more attention to our belongings and if there is a chance we are getting it back in case it has been lost.
By creating bar charts of all lost property and by borough separately, I found out that the most complaints of lost properties were received on Electronics/Phones and Bag/Wallet in Manhattan (1,2). That is the data we will search more deeply (all graphs from now on will be showing the data of Bag/Wallet and Electronics/Phone in Manhattan only).
Let us first take a look at the data by the time of the day when people complain about lost property the most (3). A sharp increase from 5 AM to 9 AM does not look surprising because that is the time most people start their day and, therefore, find time to fill out the complaint. What’s interesting is the fact that starting from 9 AM the number of complaints doesn’t go down until 1 AM. This fact is definitely proving the stereotype of New York City as “The city that never sleeps”!
On Graph 4 we can see that the amount of complaints is a lot higher on Fridays, Saturdays, and Monday. The increases on these days could be explained by going out on a weekend and sending complaints on Mondays.
Second, I decided to explore the data by the year and the season. Surprisingly, the number of complaints went very high in 2019 (2,538 complaints), while for 2014 – 2018 this number was not even 200 per year. However, the assumption of increasing crime in 2019 would be wrong at the moment. To prove this correlation, we will need a few more years of data.
In the next graph, we can see that the most complaints were received in the summertime. On the one hand, it is easy to assume that it happens every year. On the other hand, we have already discovered that 2019 had 10 times more complaints than each of the previous years. More than that, the summer of 2019 attracted millions of tourists from all over the world for the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and the World Pride celebration. Adding up those two facts, I decided to separate the data of 2019 from previous years.
As expected the summer of 2019 was the heaviest in complaints. However, the years of 2014 through 2018 show something different. (6). The first yearly increases were in March during springtime, when the weather is getting warmer and the people are more active outdoors; then we can see a decrease in May, possibly due to people leaving the city for a long weekend. In July through October, the amount of complaints generally stay the same. The last big spike of the year falls in November and December – holiday times.
By exploring the data of Lost & Found Property in NYC from different points of view, we found out that 2019 was radically different from previous years, and even though it might seem like people complain the most on summertime, normally it happens during the springtime and the holidays. Despite World Pride in the summer of 2019, radical changes in lost property complains had to happen for some other reasons. Perhaps, the data collection has had changed. But exploring this issue further is a whole another story..
Data sources:
311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present (Sep 2014 – Sep 2019), NYC Open Data
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/nyregion/nyc-tourism.html
