If you come across a person experiencing homelessness and want to offer help, one option you have is to call 311 (or make a request online). These requests are sent to The Department of Homeless Services or the NYPD who then respond according to the information provided. But what happens once your request is submitted? What efforts are made to assist the unhoused individual? Are the efforts by DHS and the NYPD effective in getting the person help? Should you even make that 311 call?
The following visualizations aim to answer these questions by showing how each agency “resolves” Homeless 311 calls and the time it takes them to do so. For this, I have used the 311 complaint data about Encampment, Homeless Encampment, Homeless Street Condition and Homeless Person Assistance from 2019 to the present in New York City.
This information is not only useful for those wanting to know what happens to their 311 requests, but it can aid agencies interested in assisting the homeless population in NYC. For DHS and the NYPD, this information is useful to evaluate their effectiveness in responding to 311 Homeless calls, which could lead to improved efforts in assisting those experiencing homelessness. Additionally, this information can aid 311 in assessing their reporting system for calls/submissions about the homeless population.
How Long Does it Take to Resolve a 311 Homeless Complaint?
In this line graph you can see how DHS and NYPD compare in the time it takes them to “resolve” a Homeless 311 Complaint from 2019 to the present. From this, the only conclusion we can make is that the NYPD consistently resolves calls quicker than DHS does. This could be because the NYPD only deals with Homeless Street Condition and Homeless Encampment calls and DHS responds to Homeless Person Assistance calls, the latter of which directly involves an individual could take more time to resolve. Or it could be because the NYPD’s budget is twice that of DHS.
In order to show the average resolution time of DHS and the NYPD from 2019 until now, a line graph was the obvious choice. To calculate the average resolution time in days on the y-axis, I decided to take the difference in days of the Resolution Action Updated Date and the Created Date. I also decided to exclude some dates where the average resolution time was way above normal (89 days in one instance), making the small differences over time easier to read.
NYPD Response to Homeless Complaints
This bar graph shows the responses the NYPD had to Homeless Street Condition and Homeless Encampment 311 complaints from 2019 to the present. Comparing the resolutions where the NYPD provided recourse (in blue) and didn’t (in red) we see that the NYPD is not entirely effective in providing recourse for 311 Homeless complaints. The NYPD’s resolutions to these complaints leaves a lot to be desired. That is not to say that the NYPD should be doing more to tackle homelessness, but that their resolutions suggest a lack of transparency in how they “resolve” complaints.
Because a bar graph is easier to read than other types, it is the best way to show the difference of complaints as I grouped them by providing recourse and not. You can clearly see the NYPD didn’t find any violation twice as much as they “took action to fix the condition” they found. In order to show this relationship clearly, I made the decision to group like Resolution Action Descriptions together, and exclude some altogether that I deemed unimportant to my research question. I also decided to distinguish between the NYPD providing recourse and not, by grouping resolutions I determined had similar outcomes, seen in blue and red respectively.
DHS Resolutions to Homeless Person Assistance 311 Requests
From this visualization we can see that more often than not, DHS can not find the individual. And if they are found, they almost always refuse assistance. Assuming the goal of DHS is to get individuals off the street, this chart suggests that DHS’s efforts in responding to Homeless Person Assistance 311 requests need improving. From 2019 till now, out of 62,537 HPA 311 requests, only 5 individuals accepted assistance. These numbers are dismal, and beg the question, why? Why couldn’t DHS find the individual? Why did so many individuals decline assistance? Regrettably, these are questions we cannot answer with this data set.
For this visualization, I chose a packed bubble chart to emphasize the number of individuals who accepted assistance in comparison to all of the other resolutions where they did not. In order to do this, first I had to group similar Resolution Action Descriptions together to make the graph more readable – with fewer bubbles the viewer will be able to see the differences more easily. Here I grouped things like; when DHS determined the issue was not within its jurisdiction, when DHS referred the request to an outside homeless outreach provider or the NYPD, and when there was not enough information to act on the request – into a resolution I called “No response from DHS”. These choices were intentional in making the relationship between “individuals who accepted assistance” and those who did not, more drastic. I also decided not to include some Resolution Action Descriptions that detracted from this relationship.
Aesthetically, I would have liked to have more control over the placement of the bubbles, but this function isn’t available in Tableau. I think moving the tiny “Individuals who accepted assistance” bubble further out from the other larger bubbles would further emphasize its minute size and make the chart more easily readable.
Next Steps
One next step could be to look at the average resolution time and the way in which the complaint was made (mobile, online, phone) to see if one leads to quicker resolution time than another. Another obvious data point that I chose not to include, as it wasn’t pertinent to my research question, is the location of the homeless 311 complaints. This can tell us if one neighborhood has more complaints than another, if it’s NYPD or DHS responding to them, and if average resolution time is different across the boroughs. All of which could assist agencies in further aiding individuals experiencing homelessness.
A more complex next step would be to see what data both NYPD and DHS collects from these interactions with individuals, and how this data could be used to better aid the homeless community.
In Conclusion
What happens once your request is submitted? What efforts are made to assist the unhoused individual? Are the efforts by DHS and the NYPD effective in getting the person help? Should you even make that 311 call?
We’ve now seen what happens when a 311 homeless request is submitted. We’ve seen that the NYPD responds much quicker than DHS and that both the efforts of the NYPD and DHS are not effective in assisting the community of homeless individuals. This begs the question, is making a call to 311 about a homeless individual more harmful than it is helpful? It seems as though the calls are not helpful in the least bit to the individual experiencing homelessness. Although the calls may be aiding the NYPD in criminalizing homelessness, DHS in keeping tabs on unhoused individuals, and the caller in feeling good about themselves. So, in my opinion, you should not make that call. By reporting a homeless individual to 311 you are causing more potential harm than you are help.
Alexandra McGlinchy 