Analysis of UPenn Alerts
The UPennAlert Emergency Notification System enables the University to quickly notify the Penn and surrounding Philadelphia community of critical information during significant emergencies or dangerous situations involving an immediate threat to the health or safety of students or employees occurring on campus.
As a Penn student, I receive texts and emails of any alerts from the UPennAlert system. I have always found these to be very helpful in order to stay safe on our open campus. I have always wondered how these alerts are distributed with time. Which street do these dangerous situations occur the most? Whether it was the narrow streets like Sansom Street or the wide “main” streets like Walnut. Which blocks do most emergencies or dangerous situations occur etc
In general, the primary responsibilities of the University Pennsylvania Police Department such as crime prevention extend from 30th Street to 43rd Street AND Market Street to Baltimore Avenue. Here is a map of UPENN below.
We can see that they cover the whole campus comprehensively.
Using my own UpennAlerts, I managed to create a small file for analysis. In this post, I will finally answer some questions like the one above!
How are alert situations distributed?
There are common categories of crime that are sent in the alerts. These include robberies, assault, etc. However, some alerts are just emails about University-wide operations. An example of such an alert is one of our amazing snow days below:
“Munashe F Mhlanga,
UPennAlert: Normal University operations are suspended for Wednesday, February 20, 2019 due to weather. Essential University staff and all Health System physicians and staff are required to report to work. See www.publicsafety.upenn.edu for details.”
After removing these I created a word cloud on the dangerous situation categories only.
As we can see, the most common alert is for robberies followed by Assault and Burglary. We had a lot of civil unrest last year(2020) during the George Floyd protests that began in the US on May 26 in Minneapolis. There were also some protests later on during the year in the Fall.
What is the usual percentage of alerts where there is a weapon involved?
This is a high percentage of alerts where there was a weapon because we have filtered to only include alerts where a crime was reported instead of all general alerts we receive like the ones about University-wide operations.
Which blocks do most alerts come from?
The number of alerts that came from that block is increasing from green to red to purple. Surprisingly, the narrow roads such as Sansom and Ludlow do not have many spread-out alerts but rather have only multiple alerts coming from the 4200 block and 4100 block respectively. Most alerts are from after the 3800 block increasing. There are more complaints on the 3100, 3200, and 3300 blocks on Walnut more than on any other street. Locust Walk is very clear and there are no alerts coming from the 39th to about S 36th street.
How much time does it take for a situation to clear after an alert is sent?
The average amount of time taken for a situation to clear is 34 minutes.
The following plot shows the amount of time taken to clear with the category of the alert.
I took the most crime categories that we were alerted with. It takes longer for protests to be cleared up which is why CIVIL UNREST has a higher median than the other crime categories. Sometimes, a curfew is put in place. In general, the other 3 crime categories have a similar median although robbery has some more outliers because it is usually a robbery with a weapon.
What is the distribution of alerts by month?
It seems that we receive more alerts during some winter months starting from September till January. These are the months when school is usually open. The number of alerts decreases during the summer.
What is the distribution of alerts by the hour?
As expected, we can see that most alerts come through from 4 pm to 2 am. Most crimes do happen at night. There is also a huge spike in alerts on 4 pm and 5 pm before they start rising after 7 pm. We receive most alerts at 8 pm.
It is important to realize that this is not representative of the crimes in Philadelphia as these are just the emergency alerts sent to students. For more information please visit the Penn public safety website.
I have compiled my alerts since 2018. This website is only for the use of my OIDD 245, Spring 2021 class project.
