////// Concept

Each of the circular shapes corresponds to 100 hate crime incidents reported to the police (London Met Police, London, UK). The definition of “Racist and Religious Hate Crime” in the UK includes non-criminal incidents triggered by the race, ethnicity, or religion of the victim. I chose this topic because of my experience of escalating anti-Eastern European sentiments and verbal abuse, which, unfortunately, doesn’t even scratch the surface of the problem.
The flowing veil surrounding the dark unhappy shapes is my representation of the sometimes invisible ‘shield’ of love, support, friendship. I wanted to find a way to elevate the acts of kindness that happen in the community all the time. While media accounts of negative sentiments abound, the positive stories rarely get recorded. (but there are some)

////// Data

Data used: Racist and Religious Hate Crime, London Metropolitan Police

Notes: I chose not to display the actual numbers, but rather use the data and shapes to convey the scale of the problem. For notes and methodology, and preparation code, see Jupyter notebook here, or in-browser notebook here.

////// Credits

I started learning p5.js only a couple of months ago, and I couldn’t have done this without the amazing video tutorials of The Coding Train (Daniel Shiffman). I look forward to continuing my learning and to more creative coding projects in p5.

Made by Dea Bankova in 2021.