As someone who’s grown up in an urban/suburban environment my whole life, I’ve had two thoughts when flashing lights and sirens go by: Where are they going? It’ll never happen to me. Having lived in a college area the last three years, the presence of police cars has increased, the incidence of crimes around me have increased, and the amount of people close to me who have been a victim of crime have increased. I wanted to explore this contradiction of removal from the passing police to the growing unease about how safe we really are.
Starting since midnight of the current day, the map iterates through every hour until the present. A “beat” – one of 51 regions that the Seattle Police Department divides the city into - will light up during a time step if a police car was dispatched there during that hour. The data is pulled from the Seattle PD’s “Tweets by Beat” Twitter accounts using a PHP script, then uploaded to the Arduino via Serial.
UW DXARTS Mechatronic Art I 2017.