Hate Crime Tracker

The Idea

Raising awareness about anti-Asian hate crimes and tracking incidents can help shine a light on the issue and potentially lead to solutions or interventions.

It need to collect and aggregate the data with best effort. And it collect anti-Asian incidents from online public sources and provide hyperlinks (accompanied by titles and brief excerpts of the reports) that direct you to the original sources of information.

The Challenges

There are several challenges to creating a hate crime tracking website, including:

• Data collection

  Collecting reliable and accurate data can be challenging, particularly when it comes to hate crimes. Not all incidents may be reported or documented, and some may be misreported or misclassified.

• Data privacy

  Collecting and sharing sensitive data related to hate crimes can raise privacy concerns for individuals and communities affected by these incidents. It’s important to ensure that proper safeguards are in place to protect the privacy and confidentiality of those involved.

• Resources

  Building and maintaining a website to track hate crimes requires resources, including funding, personnel, and technical expertise. It can be challenging to secure these resources, particularly for grassroots or community-based initiatives.

• Legal considerations

  The legal landscape around hate crimes can be complex, and it’s important to ensure that any website or data collection effort is in compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

• Impact

  Sharing information about hate crimes can have a psychological impact on individuals and communities affected by these incidents. It’s important to consider the potential impact of the website on these groups and to provide resources and support as needed.

The Design ¹

When designing the website and portal, I think it’s important to consider the needs of users and ensure that the interface is intuitive and easy to use. Therefore, I have designed a website that includes data visualization with interaction features such as charts, maps, and tables to provide a clear and direct view of ongoing anti-Asian hate crime incidents on a daily basis. Additionally, I have created a portal that allows members to log in and manage news sources, ensuring that the data collection process is efficient and effective. Lastly, the website also includes a comment feature to facilitate discussion and engagement around the issue.

The Code

Gather police departmetn twitter ids manually and store it as array, fetch tweets by id using python, save result to database[PostgreSQL]

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12

for twitter_id in twitter_ids:
    # ... configuration

    tweets = twint.output.tweets_list
    for tweet in tweets:
        data = (
            tweet.timestamp, tweet.user_id, tweet.username, tweet.name, tweet.tweet, tweet.mentions, tweet.urls, tweet.hashtags, tweet.cashtags, tweet.link, tweet.geo, tweet.source
        )
        try:
            insert_data(data)
        except (Exception, psycopg2.DatabaseError) as error:
            print(error)

When we gather enough data from twitter with all categories that we needs, sort it by hashtags and use NLP to analysis each tweets whether it contains hate crimes informations.

Frontend ²

Taking advantage of ReactJS funcitonal componment, It allows me to create Context to fetch JSON data from Backend API and present it.

Backend ³

Using the Twitter API, it is possible to fetch data that is related to specific keywords or topics from the Twitter platform. This allowing me to access and analyze relevant content, which can be valuable for a variety of purposes, such as tracking hate crime in specific area and date range. Furthermore, We utilized Python Flask to develop lightweight API and share it to public.