NYC crime data reveals a surprising pattern, blogger claims

A Tumblr blogger used New York City’s publicly available crime data to ask the question: “What times of day do major felonies happen?”

Ben Wellington, a professor at the Pratt Institute and the man behind the I Quant NY Tumblr account, found that, according to the data, there is a rise in robberies at the end of the city’s school day.

According to Wellington, after parsing through New York City’s publicly available crime data to first find out what time most crimes occur around the city, he found that the data followed a logical pattern: While crimes like grand larceny were less frequent in the early morning and spiked around midnight or noon, robberies in particular were an exception to this rule. What caught his eye were spikes in robberies at 8:00 a.m and 3:00 p.m. — times that Wellington connected to the start and end of New York City’s K-12 school day.

Using a series of graphs and charts, Wellington explored this subject more deeply and found multiple pieces of evidence, which he says suggest that “there are two times more robberies between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. on school weekdays than non-school weekdays in February and April.” He also claims that “school days have 15 percent more robberies than vacation weekdays, and school days have about 8 percent more burglaries, felony assaults and grand larcenies.”

The good news? Wellington reported that between 2006 and 2015, “robberies on school days have dropped 32 percent, and robberies committed between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. on school days have dropped 44 percent!”

Check out Wellington’s entire blog post on the I Quant NY Tumblr account.