Barbara Douglass Information Visualization Fall 2011 Professor Sula Information Visualization: Marijuana Arrests The visualizations in my final project focused on marijuana arrests in New York City. I created a line graph, several bar charts and contextual blurbs in a poster-style visualization to tell a story about the increasing amount of racist and wasteful arrests happening in New York City over the last 30 plus years. Some background information on the relevancy of this topic is necessary to someone viewing this visualization, so I will give a brief background on marijuana law and its implementation in New York City. In 1977 the Marihuana Reform Act decriminalized marijuana. Carrying up to 7/8ths of an ounce of marijuana became a violation similar to a minor traffic ticket. As long as that amount or less of marijuana is not open to public view or burning, a person cannot be arrested for carrying marijuana. This law still applies today. However, around 1994 we see a dramatic increase in the amount of people being arrested for carrying marijuana. The “stop and frisk” practice also came into play. “Stop and frisk” is a tactic used by police to trick and intimidate people into showing them the contents of their pockets thereby forcing them to break the law by exposing their marijuana to public view. As stated in the text of the Marihuana Reform Act, the intent of decriminalizing marijuana was to halt the ruining of lives, wasting of millions of dollars in law enforcement resources and detracting from the prosecution of serious crimes. The NYPD has blatantly ignored this law and engaged in questionable and illegal practices to needlessly recriminalize marijuana. My intent for this visualization is to elucidate just how much this law has been ignored and how racist and wasteful marijuana criminalization truly is. I also want to say though my intent is to shed light on a certain
Barbara Douglass Information Visualization Fall 2011 Professor Sula Information Visualization: Marijuana Arrests happening I strongly feel is unjust, my design choices are honest, based on fact and do not attempt to skew information in any way. The poster is topically divided into three sections: the first third concerns the exponential increase in arrests from 1978 to 2010, the second contains arrests and usage as they are distributed by race and the third shows how much money has been spent on these marijuana arrests. The first visualization is a line graph showing the each year’s amount of arrests from 1978 to 2010 divided into colored sections symbolizing different mayors. I wanted the viewer to get an idea of the shape of the data and to whom the arrest rate was attributed to—Mayors Koch, Dinkins, Guiliani or Bloomberg. The line does not stray far from the x-axis until 1994 when Guiliani comes into office. My color choice here was simply to use cool, pleasing colors that would meld well with the browns I knew I would use in the race visualizations. The scale is done in 10,000 increments and goes up to 60,000. The arrests under Koch and Dinkins range from around 800 to 3000 with one year being uncharacteristically high at 4,546 arrests. I understand in an increment of 10,000, those numbers cannot easily be elucidated. However, some specificity is sacrificed here so as to highlight comparison over time. Eight hundred or even 3000 is low when comparing it to 50,000 marijuana arrests, and that was the point of the line graph. The second graph is a simple bar chart cutting the range of 1978 to 2010 in half and showing that distribution. I grouped 1978 to 1994, which is 17 years, and 1994 to 2010, which is 16 years. The first bar shows a total of 34,177 arrests and the second
Barbara Douglass Information Visualization Fall 2011 Professor Sula Information Visualization: Marijuana Arrests shows 542,038—a (something) percent change. Once again the scale is done in large increments—100,000—but doing anything smaller would make the bar graph very tall. I also included the actual figures atop the bars so as to create clarity. These two graphs are flanked with contextual bubbles that talk about the Marihuana Reform Act and what that means. The second third of the poster is based on division by race. The first is a stacked bar graph showing what percentage of people are getting arrested according to their race. The races I included are white, black, Latino and other. The colors I used were on a cream to brown spectrum. The colors are racially referenced, which I thought was bold and makes things a little more explicit. From the bottom up you can estimate what percentage of black people are arrested for marijuana but you can’t quickly do the same for the other races. I did not include precise percentages for each race. This was a design choice sacrificing specificity for beauty and simplicity while giving an idea of the distribution. It’s also not impossible to figure out the others. Placed right below this stacked bar graph is another stacked bar graph showing the racial distribution of people who use marijuana aged 18 to 25 years old in the United States. There is data for ages 12 to 17 and 26 and older, but I chose to use 18 to 25 because it is more representative of overall arrests. Data about marijuana usage for specifically New York City was not available which is why I used U.S. marijuana usage data. The same colors are used to show consistency with the former graph and link the two graphs. The data available (to my knowledge) for marijuana usage starts back in 2002 and as of now ends in 2009. Both graphs begin at 2002 but the marijuana arrests
Barbara Douglass Information Visualization Fall 2011 Professor Sula Information Visualization: Marijuana Arrests graph ends in 2010, which I thought should be included even if it didn’t match precisely to the usage graph due to it being time relevant. The last third of the poster deals with money spent on marijuana arrests by the city of New York. One arrest costs the city $1500 to $2000 or more. Taking the lowest figure, $1500, and multiplying it by the number of arrests for 2010 I got over $75,000,000—the amount of money spent on marijuana arrests in New York City. Harry Levine and the Drug Policy Alliance published a report earlier this year coming to the same figure. In a small bar graph I compared the exact number, $75,574,500 to the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch’s budget for 2010, which is $32,507,000. This bar graph makes it apparent that money from a year’s worth of marijuana arrests could support two BPLs for a year. This is explicated in a small blurb at the bottom right of the poster. The critiques I received in class were for my choices of color and my date ranges in the related stacked bar graphs concerning race factors for marijuana arrests versus usage of marijuana. Initially, my color choices were a range of greens, teals, yellows and browns simply made for aesthetic consistency throughout the chart. I did agree that similar colors could illicit confusion relating things that might be unrelated, so different colors—purple and blue—were introduced. I also modified the date range of the marijuana usage charts. Early in October a gallup poll was released saying 50% of Americans favored marijuana legalization. There is a lot of other data available to potentially create a larger more comprehensive visualization that would further illustrate the harmful effects of
Barbara Douglass Information Visualization Fall 2011 Professor Sula Information Visualization: Marijuana Arrests marijuana criminalization. However, I wanted to create a visualization that would quickly and effectively demonstrate how marijuana laws are implemented in an unjust manner. My data was acquired from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or SAMHSA, Professor at Queens College and CUNY Harry G. Levine whose research focuses on marijuana arrests in NYC and also work from the Drug Policy Alliance. References Levine, Harry G., Small, Deborah P., (April 2008). Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City, 1997-2007. Retrieved from http://marijuanaarrests.com/ Levine, Harry G. Seigel, Loren. (March 2011). $75 Million a Year: The Cost of New York City's Marijuana Arrests. New York: Drug Policy Alliance, March 2011. Retrieved from http://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/_75_Million_A_Year.pdf Drug Policy Alliance. www.drugpolicy.org Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration http://www.samhsa.gov/