Berkeley Crime Heatmap

Inspiration

We get a lot of emails from the UCPD about recent crimes, but it's hard to keep a record of where crimes are happening. We wanted a way to aggregate them and have a sense of where it's dangerous, so we decided to create a heatmap of criminal activities.

What it does

Currently, we've only implemented a way to display the map and marking it at given locations. In the future, we want to add the functionality of crowd-sourcing the crime scenes as it happens to take into account both immediate and historical data.

How we built it

We used Expo and the Mapview API to show the map and plot the locations of the crimes.

Challenges we ran into

This is the first time we used React-Native and Expo, so we had a lot of trouble getting used to the syntax, understanding how the code works in general, and debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Persevering despite constant bugs and difficulty understanding the language.

What we learned

React is a very useful language, and being able to utilize API's is highly valuable.

What's next for Berkeley Crime Heatmap

There are several steps: 1) Create a way to gather data -- either make it crowdsourced or parse emails and add pins in the desired places. 2) Implement a safe route finding method using Dijkstra's (or another method). 3) Create the heat map (creating hot zones when multiple pins are in the same location). 4) Implement a button that can be pressed that sends in the person's location to the police and other users. The idea is that people keep this app open so they can press the button on command. We can also use this as a data collection method by marking this as a dangerous location on our map.

Built With

• expo.io
• mapview
• react-native