Slicing and dicing NYC Noise: Complaints closed out by NYPD with no comment/note as to the action taken, if any.

When a city agency closes out a 311 service request,  it is accompanied by a brief description of the action the agency took to dispose off the complaint. Of all noise complaints directed from 311 to the NYPD for resolution between 2004 and 2017, a total of 720,790 service requests were closed out but without any indication of what action was taken. One assumption is that no action was taken on these service requests, but they needed to be closed out. The breakdown by year is:

This option to close out a complaint without assigning a ‘how’, seems to have been removed in 2011 and there are no NAs thereafter.  All noise complaints are further subdivided by type/source of noise. The following table gives a summary of the various types of noise complaints that were closed out without indicating action taken for the period 2004 to 2011.

2010 appears to have had the highest rate of closing out with no notes about action taken. So I took a closer look to see if there was also a difference in the types of noise that got closed out without notes. There wasn’t.

311 data from NYC Open Data downloaded at various times. As of Feb 5, 2018, 27 million rows, 52 variables till 2009, 53 variables from 2010. Parsed using R v3.4.3 in RStudio v1..1.423