We’ve had a monstrous data set (over half a million lines) around for a very long time (since some point last summer) showing the time but not date of a year’s worth of Toronto police dispatch calls by category – ‘assault in progress and so forth’. The reason we never did anything with it had to do with not seeing how to visualize it in the way you see below. (The concept owed a lot to this graphic).

Recently, we figured out how to create what we needed in Tableau (see below) and what follows is a unique portrait of the daily cycles of Toronto’s dark side. Click on the image to see the graphic/story package: