Somerville Traffic Citation Violations from 2017

2017 onward traffic citation data from the Somerville Police Department, detailing individual violations from written warnings and fines. Each row represents a single violation within a citation. The dataset is maintained by the City of Somerville's data team and is updated daily with a one-month reporting delay.

Use Cases

• Analyze spatial patterns of violations by clustering incidents using Latitude and Longitude coordinates.
• Model the likelihood of a Warning Flag being issued based on Violation Category, Vehicle MPH, and MPH Zone.
• Identify temporal hotspots by analyzing citation frequency by Police Shift and Date and Time Issued.
• Assess enforcement focus areas by correlating Violation Code frequencies with Ward or Block Code.

Strengths

• Daily update frequency ensures current data with a known one-month lag.
• Contains 14 distinct columns providing violation, location, and contextual details.
• Time series spans from 2017 onward, offering multi-year trend analysis.

Limitations

• Unknown total row count prevents assessment of statistical significance.
• Geographic scope is limited to the city of Somerville, Massachusetts.
• Sample data is unavailable for preliminary data quality inspection.

Provenance

Source

Somerville Police Department, via data.somervillema.gov.

Collection Method

Officer-issued traffic citations recorded in police systems.

Time Range

2017 to present (with one-month reporting delay).

Freshness

Updated daily with a one-month delay; last platform update was 2026-04-03.

Geography

Somerville, Massachusetts, USA.