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donuthorse t1_j78ppul wrote

Someone is trying to hurt and kill dogs in my home town! I need help!

A little bit of background: I live in a town in Sweden with around 340.000 people. Since December 2020 - Today, we've had over 150 known attempts to try to hurt and kill dogs.

The perpetrator, in most cases, deploys small baked bread buns containg sharp, hand made "stars" made out of pieces of tin can. Sometimes the buns are dropped in plain sight, sometimes near bushes / under leaves etc.

Now, I have collected all the police reports, gone through them all and entered them into excel with dates, time when reported (where applicable), on what address it happened etc.

Can someone help me to visualize this somehow? Maybe there is some kind of pattern? Maybe I'm grasping at straws here.. but maybe someone can help me?

Thank you

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RattisTheRat t1_j8r5ggs wrote

From what you’ve written, I think viewing this as a line chart over time would be helpful.

A step further, if your town is split into areas, I.e. up town, down town, east block, west block, etc & view that again as a time series you might see a pattern in events in different areas there

Edit: you might see that an event that occursed in the ‘west block’ often has an event in the ‘up town’

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PsychologicalEgg9377 t1_j94589f wrote

This is awful to hear. If it's the same person or group, you might find some pattern based around weekdays, holidays, time of day, etc. Try labeling them based on date/time and see if you can run some summary statistics. If it's kids, it might increase during holidays. If it's someone jobless, there may be no pattern. This is all speculation, but it's a starting point.

Machine learning might be able to offer some insights as well, but that might be too steep a learning curve.

Good luck in finding them

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