Jail Roster Booking Chart Data for 2015

Whatcom County Jail Roster Bookings categorized by arbitrary search term from Jaunary 1 to June 19 2015.

Last updated 5:15 AM 6/24/2015 -RMF

Wednesday this week the Bellingham City Club will feature three speakers on the topic: 
"Are we building a jail for the future or are we stuck in the past?". Today and tonight's agenda for the Whatcom County Council includes Jail Items. Below the break are some charts that look at data from Whatcom County Jail Roster press releases for 2015 from January 1st through June 19.  Clearly assault,  DUI,  DWLS, and violations (usually of protective orders) drive the volume of most charges for jail bookings in Whatcom County. 

The charts and data are subject to revision which I will note. This period (January 1st throught June 19, 2015) covers 6217 separate charged crimes from 333 unique crimes types in 72 unique 'Court' Codes.  6217 separate crimes were charged in 3102 separate 'bookings' against 2603 unique (individuals) IDs. 409 individuals were booked more than once in this period. 32 (individuals) IDs were booked more than thrice. Click on the charts to Enlarge. R 3.2 code with some output is here.


Most of the charts below have as their x (horizontal) axis either:

• (A)  the number of crimes charged when booked or
• (B) "Court" code under which the booked  individual was charged.

In understanding these charts, it may he be helpful to refer to the original data. An individual can be charged with multiple crimes but all under the same "court" code.  The leading chart for this story (see top) and the third bar graph below summarize the charges by 'search term'. For example there are four degrees of ASSAULT.  A simple 'grep' captures any term with "ASSAULT" in the charge. Similary, there are three degrees of DWLS ("Driving With License Suspended"). :

[1] "Grep for:"
[1] "DWLS"
             Crime Freq
DWLS 3RD DEGREE  506
DWLS 1ST DEGREE   87
DWLS 2ND DEGREE   80

The charts titled, "Arbitrary Categories created by Search Terms" group these charges together. This technique provides for some duplication per group, but also gives a clearer view of the weight of related crimes.

As I was discussing this article with friends last night, some terrible math occurred to me:

(((Unique Individuals Booked/number of days 2015 sample) * days in Year) / Whatcom County 2015 approx Population) * (Make a Percentage) =  

The percent of our county population that are booked into Whatcom County Jail each if everyone booked came from Whatcom County. That number is 2.7%. We book what would be 2.7% of our populace in jail every year in Whatcom County.

(((2603/168) * 365) / 210000) * 100
[1] 2.693013