Norwegian newspaper VG has been mapping murders in Norway for the reason that flip of the millennium. The cumulative knowledge in Homicide in Norway permits the paper to offer some fascinating insights into Norwegian homicides. For instance, this yr, 61% of homicide victims have been killed by a member of the family or a associate/ex-partner. Final yr, 45% of homicide victims had been killed by their associate or ex-partner. Unsurprisingly, in most of these circumstances, the sufferer was a girl killed by her male associate or ex-partner. To date this century, 90% of murders in Norway have been carried out by males.
Drap i Norge has used VG’s murder knowledge to create an interactive map of all Norwegian murders since 2000. This map plots the place every homicide occurred and permits customers to filter the outcomes by homicide weapon and the assassin’s nation of start. Pen portraits of every homicide sufferer are additionally displayed within the map sidebar.
I not often overview crime maps on Maps Mania as a result of I typically discover them uninformative. One main subject with most crime maps is that they solely plot crimes reported to the police, which may be deceptive. For instance, I’ve had three or 4 bikes stolen during the last 20 years and have by no means reported any of those thefts to the police.
I believe that unreported crime is much less of a difficulty with homicides, making homicide maps considerably extra dependable. Nonetheless, regardless of being much less affected by knowledge assortment points, a ‘homicide map’ nonetheless has lots of the shortcomings generally related to crime maps. As an example, VG’s Homicide in Norway map (proven under) misleadingly seems to counsel that individuals are way more prone to be murdered within the south of the nation than within the north.
The fact, in fact, is sort of completely different. Each the Drap i Norge interactive map and VG’s Homicide in Norway map are easy plots of all of the murders which have occurred in Norway this century. Neither map normalizes the information by inhabitants.
In knowledge visualization, normalizing by inhabitants means adjusting knowledge values to account for variations in inhabitants dimension, enabling fairer comparisons between completely different areas. The density of crimson dots on each Drap i Norge and Homicide in Norway maps is merely a mirrored image of inhabitants density, providing little perception into homicide charges throughout the nation.
As an alternative of displaying uncooked totals, which may be deceptive, these maps may present the choice to normalize the information ‘per capita’ for every county. This might give viewers a a lot clearer image of homicide charges throughout the completely different areas of Norway. To be actually informative the maps may even present different demographic and socioeconomic knowledge layers – permitting the consumer to discover what could also be a number of the underlying contributing components to localized murder charges.
