CrimeEye 1

By Hans Mehlin, 2024.

Crimeeye is an ongoing project started in September 2024. During the summer a shooting took place close to where I live and I was reminded that three parameters matter: distance, severity and time. Using the open API provided by the Swedish police I fetch real time data regarding violance and crime in Sweden. I visualize this data in my arduino and web project CrimeEye1.

By using the API endpoint at https://polisen.se/api/events I can fetch the latest events in Sweden. This includes the type of crime, the location and the time of the event.

The data is fetched once every hour and from this I create a simpler API at https://varbodastudio.se/crimeeye1/data.json which only include crime of violence and contains three paramenets: Time in minutes since the event, distance to the event in kilometers from where I were at that time, and severity of the crime on a scale from 1 to 5. Severity is a very subjective scale where 5 is suspected murder and 1 is general damage.

I will build my arduino visualization as a led iris. Partly because that would fit in my room, partly because I think of this visualization as an eye watching over crime in Sweden. As a first step, before building the Arduino board, I have done a mockup in p5. The iris will have 16 arms with 10 leds each. The data will be plotted as a time based histogram, where each arm is a point in time. Blue colors represent low severity and red colors high severity. The number of leds that are light in each arm represent the distance. Further out are further away, and close to the center is an event that occured close to me. The iris is animated to slowly rotate clock wise.

I have also created a web version in the form of animated arcs. I have kept the round eye formation, but used arcs instead of leds. Again, the color represent severity in the same way as abowe. Distance is reversed, where the inner thinner arcs are further away and the outher thicker archs represent closer events. The brightness of the arcs represent the time passed since the event. The lighter the more distant in time, and the intense colors are events recent in time. The position and the length of the arcs are random.