Identifying Wasteful 311 Requests in San Francisco

What is 311?

3-1-1 is an easy-to-remember telephone number that connects people with service representatives who route people to non-emergency City and County of San Francisco government matters.

Why 311?

With over 2,300 different telephone numbers listed to access local government services, many people did not know what number to dial to reach the appropriate department. Before 311, over 50% of calls to the 911 center were not emergency related. 311 relieves 911 operators from these non-emergency calls.

Problem Statement

311 captures requests for service from the public, and the public is unaware if the issue they see has already been reported. Often times a single incident generates multiple requests while some incidents do not generate any requests. There are also cases where service agents respond to an incident on-site, to find that the issue has already been resolved or worse, nothing is found.

Wasteful requests account for about 25% of all requests and identifying them will help reduce the queue for over 100 agencies that respond to these requests.

What is wasteful?

• Requests for the same issue
• Invalid requests or not enough information
• Nothing is found once an agency responds to a request on site

Here are some keywords extracted from the incident status notes which I used to create the target to label wasteful requests:

Data

DataSF provides requests created since 7/1/2008 as a CSV as well as through the Socrata Open Data API (SODA).

Shape of data:

• Rows: 4.1M (each row is a 311 case)
• Columns: 20

Column	Description	Type
CaseID	The unique ID of the service request created.	Number
Opened	The date and time when the service request was made	Date & Time
Closed	The date and time when the service request was closed	Date & Time
Updated	The date and time when the service request was last modified. For requests with status=closed, this will be the date the request was closed	Date & Time
Status	A single-word indicator of the current state of the service request. (Note: GeoReport V2 only permits ‘open’ and ‘closed’)	Plain Text
Status Notes	Explanation of why status was changed to current state or more details on current status than conveyed with status alone	Plain Text
Responsible Agency	The agency responsible for fulfilling or otherwise addressing the service request.	Plain Text
Category	The human readable name of the service request type	Plain Text
Request Type	The human readable name of the service request subtype	Plain Text
Request Details	The human readable name of the service request details	Plain Text
Address	Human readable address or description of location	Plain Text
Street	Primary Street of the associated address. Parks may have a park name instead of a street name. Requests not associated with an address will be blank.	Plain Text
Supervisor District	San Francisco Supervisor District as defined in 'Supervisor Districts as of April 2012'	Number
Neighborhood	San Francisco Neighborhood as defined in 'SF Find Neighborhoods'	Plain Text
Police District	San Francisco Police District as defined in 'Current Police Districts'	Plain Text
Latitude	Latitude of the location, using the WGS84 projection	Number
Longitude	Longitude of the location, using the WGS84 projection	Number
Point	Combination of Latitude and Longitude for Socrata native maps	Location
Source	Mechanism or path by which the service request was received; typically ‘Phone’, ‘Text/SMS’, ‘Website’, ‘Mobile App’, ‘Twitter’, etc but terms may vary by system.	Plain Text
Media URL	A URL to media associated with the request, e.g. an image.	Website URL

Quick Insight

The top 4 request types, made up about two-thirds of all requests – 64%. More importantly, parking and encampment requests have high rates of “wastefulness”.

Classifier Results

To better interpret over 105k predictions of the model, I used a confusion matrix which I normalized to represent the mean number of requests per day – 2000.

On any given day, the model can accurately predict about 339 wasteful requests. Although 255 would be considered false positives, these aren’t as alarming because it’s likely that SF311 and public agencies don’t report all “wasteful” requests. It’s likely that the model is doing better than advertised.