SFFD Efficiency Visual Analysis

Jiadong Wu & Xue Feng

JW's Prototype


Story Behind This Theme

Criminal Mind [S14E07]
"Marcus and his brother think that where you live not only determines your quality of life but your quality of care".
"Your zip code determines your fate. That's why they're moving these people back and forth".
"They're trying to show us the disparity in response times. That's why they call 9-1-1"
"Yeah, rich neighborhoods get faster care than poor neighborhoods"
"They called 9-1-1 9 times, and for whatever reason, it tooks the ambulance 27 minutes to get there . Tom was pronounced dead at the scense"

Caption

The above is a heat map that visualize the SFFD respnse efficieny among Top 5 "Rich Neighborhoods" and Top 5 "Poor Neighborhoods" in San Francisco. This heatmap is designed to discover potential social injustice on the waiting time after calling 911. The vertical axis shows the ten neighborhoods I picked in purpose. The top 5 neighborhoods on the y-axis is Top 5 "Rich Neighborhoods" in San Francisco, and the bottom 5 neighborhoods on the y-axis is Top 5 "Poor Neighborhoods" in San Francisco. The horizontal axis indicates hour of the day in order to narrow down the time range for further comparison. In addition, the color encoding the average SFFD response time during each hour of the day for every neighborhoods, and the color legend is also included in the Prototype within range through 3 minutes to 15 minutes.

Interpretation

With the intention to discover potential social injustice, I've compared the average response time through this heatmap. Fortunately, we didn't discover the social injustice on SFFD response time among "Rich Neighborhoods" and "Poor Neighborhoods" in San Francisco. To be specific, as we can see on the heatmap above, there are not much difference of SFFD average response time among "Rich Neighborhoods" and "Poor Neighborhoods" in San Francisco. Even though Bayview Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley having a relatively long waiting time period, it still in a acceptable range of 15 minutes.
As a result, I conclude that there is no difference on waiting time after calling 911 in San Francisco whether you live in a "Rich Neighborhood" or a "Poor Neighborhood" in San Francisco.




XF's Prototype


Caption

This bubble chart represents how fast San Francisco Fire Department responses. The efficieny is measured by two different time ranges in x, y axis correspondly, which are 1) time difference between Dispatch time and Received time, 2) time difference between Dispatch time and On Scene time. Each bubble represents a different region in San Francisco, with 41 regions in total. The color of the bubble chart represents the location measured by the continuous variable, Latitude, from South to North. At the same time, each bubble in the chart indicates the count of incidents in each region. This prototype will be interactive when the D3 version is done. To be specific, when the user move the mouse to different bubble, more detail informaiton, for example the count of incidents happened in that specific region, will be shown.

Interpretation

From the x-axis, we see that the time from the call received at the 911 Dispatch Center to 911 operator dispatches this unit to the call is mostly from 120 seconds to 160 seconds, which is 2 minutes to ~5.3 minutes. This is a reasonable and normal response time. From the y-axis, we can see that the time from the unit records arriving to the location of the incident to the time 911 operator dispatches this unit to the call is mostly from 350 seconds to 480 seconds, which is 5.8 minutes to 8 minutes. And measured by two different range of time, we can see the responding time are normal for the most resgions in San Francisco.