We Are What We Steal.

Crimes are a reflection of the period and society in which they occur. What happened, the objects and people involved, the location, how it was recorded - or even if it was recorded - all tell us something about the values, attitudes, and power structures of the day.

This data visualisation looks at the almost 20 million words that were written in the New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime from the beginning of 1860 up until the end of 1900* to see what it shows about how the people, places, and things, changed in NSW over that period. But this is not a law-and-order piece, as it's not so much interested in the crimes themselves, but rather the data in aggregate, and what else is documented in the process of recording them. Changing fashions, new technologies, new modes of transport, the establishment of new towns, increasing wealth, all this is recorded in the gazette - along with the racism of the day - as a by-product of reporting the crimes (and other police matters) that occurred. For example, what objects were valued enough (and existed at the time) in order to be stolen? How did people dress, both those committing the (alleged) crimes, and the items of clothing that were stolen? Where did people live? What materials were in use? What modes of transport were used? Crime as a proxy for societal change.

Disclaimer

This project merely counts the number of times certain words and phrases appear in the gazette in a given year, so it's obviously a massive oversimplification of what's actually occurring over the period (though it does normalise the count against the total number of words in the gazette that year). On top of that, with few exceptions it doesn’t check for duplicates, typos, nor exclude notices in the gazette that refer to incidents from interstate. Also, given the text used is the result of optical character recognition (OCR), and the original documents themselves are old, there's also - understandably - a number of errors in the original conversion ('G' mistaken for 'C', 'f' for 't', '3' for '8' etc, and vice versa).

About the gazette

The gazette was initially called 'Reports of Crime, etc., etc., for Police Information' and was bi-weekly, published on Mondays and Thursdays, from 1860 (the earliest digitised issue the library seems to have is #45 from Monday 4th of June, 1860). The first issue under the title New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime was published Wednesday 5th of March, 1862, and was roughly weekly from then on.

The gazette published a range of information relevant to the NSW police force, such as promotions, police dismissed from the force, released prisoners, deserters, corrections and updates to previous issues, as well as occasional supplements from other government gazettes. But the bulk is to do with the crimes committed and the often evocative descriptions of the (alleged) perpetrator(s) that follow. A typical record of a crime will follow a similar format and note what occurred, the rough time and date (if known), the location, as well as if there was a reward.

The general approach

The approach was quite simple: count how many times a word or phrase appears in a given year, and see how that changes over time. I didn't look for context, so with few exceptions the code makes no distinction between whether, for example, it was a Panama hat that was stolen, or the Panama hat was worn by the (alleged) suspect.