Lens 2 of 5: borders
Nine in ten noise complaints are routed to the police, and the police are organised by precinct. The line on the map decides who picks up the call. So the second lens ignores streets and neighbourhoods and looks only at those lines.
minutes
That is the citywide median time between a police noise complaint and its closure, over incidents from 2023 to 2025. The map colours each precinct by its own median. The fastest, the 17th in Midtown East, closes half its calls within minutes. The slowest, the 106th in Ozone Park, takes .
"Closed" means the police recorded an outcome, most often that officers responded or the caller could not be reached. It is a proxy for response speed, not for silence.
Fastest and slowest precincts by median minutes to close, 2023 to 2025. Only precincts with at least 500 incidents.
vs minutes
The 17th and 19th precincts meet along East 59th Street. Take only the complaints filed within 400 ft of that line, the same buildings, the same bars, the same traffic. South of it, half are closed within minutes. North of it, . The neighbourhood does not change at the kerb. The responder does.
and incidents on each side. The difference is not chance (Mann-Whitney p < 0.001).
of borders
Every shared boundary between two precincts, drawn thicker and warmer where the slower side waits longer. On borders the slower side waits at least twice as long; on at least half as long again. On of the the gap is statistically clear.
Within 400 ft of a line, the median on each side tracks that precinct's overall median (r = ). The band behaves like its precinct, not like its street.
Median minutes to close, by year, in the 17th (teal) and 19th (coral) precincts. Until 2019 both took about two hours; since 2020 both close calls much faster, and they drifted apart again in 2024 and 2025.
Precincts differ in staffing, in how many calls they receive per officer, and in how they log outcomes. A fast closure can be a quick visit or a quick "unable to locate". This lens shows that the line matters; it cannot show why. And it says nothing about when the noise happens. That is the third lens.
Same dots, another lens: the clock