For this assignment you are going to bring together all of the new computer and analytic skills you have learned to address a specific crime problem, in this case crimes involving some type of assault (e.g., murder, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation). You will be assigned a specific U.S. state to focus on and each state has data on 6 to 10 medium sized cities. Your job is to fully analyze the data provided and suggest a possible target area(s) or a refined problem that could be addressed using a Problem-Oriented Policing strategy.
The datasets or Excel files you have been provided contain real crime data from agencies that participate in NIBRS. Separate data files are available for each element of a criminal incident, including incident information (also referred to as “administrative”), offenses, property, victims, arrestees, and drugs seized. To create these files we first identified each incident that had at least one offense involving an assault. Using the unique ID assigned to each case we then extracted all of the additional data for each of the selected incidents. For any given criminal incident therefore, you will have at least one assault offense. If property items were stolen, vandalized, etc. then you might have multiple property records for an incident. Likewise, some incidents have more than one victim, more than one person arrested, etc.
With regard to the analyses you should conduct it is very important that you address the general questions below. For more specific guidance carefully review the grading rubric provided.
1. How many incidents were there and what are the different types of offenses involved? Does this crime problem seem to be getting worse or better over time in your assigned state?
2. How often is there an arrest associated with these incidents (i.e., the clearance rate)?
3. When did these crimes occur? Did the frequency vary by time of day, day of week, or month?
4. Where did these crimes happen? Are there certain cities in your assigned state that have greater problems with this crime than others? Are most of the assaults in homes, bars, or outside?
5. Who are the people arrested or cited for these offenses?
6. Who are the victims involved in these incidents? How are the victims and offenders related to one another?
7. What kinds of property (and/or drugs) were involved in these crimes? How much money was lost overall due to these crimes?
Once you have found answers to these questions you will need to write up a summary report. This should be written as a stand-alone document in MS Word with attached graphs and tables (minimum of 3 each) . The document should look and read like a professional report. There is also an answer sheet that you must complete for this assignment.
As with any paper or report it is important to first establish who your audience is. In this case you are to imagine that the report has been requested by the state Criminal Justice Council. They plan to design and implement a strategic intervention addressing assaults. Your job is to inform them about these offenses (e.g., who, what, when, where) and help them narrow their focus to a subtype of the crime that is more suitable for a Problem-Oriented Policing intervention. The basis for your narrowed target could be geographic (e.g., City X which has a rate of crime three times higher), temporal (e.g., a new state ordinance that impacts a certain time period in which crime is high), it could be specific to a certain type of victim or offender (e.g., juveniles, intimate partners), or a combination of these factors.
Just to be clear, your job here as the crime analyst is to tell the Criminal Justice Council where/when/with whom to intervene. It is NOT your job to tell the Council how to intervene. You help them find an area to focus on but you are not responsible for crafting the actual intervention.
My final suggestions for you are these:
1. Make sure you read and understand all of the instructions – if you don’t understand the assignment contact me or a Teaching Assistant to ask for clarification before you put a lot of work into something that might be way off target.
2. Get started early – there is no way you can do a good job on this report in a single day or at the last minute.
3. Prepare you datasets in advance – Each Excel file contains data from multiple states. You need to filter the data down to focus ONLY on your assigned state and you need to do this for each datafile (i.e., incidents, offenses, property, victims, arrestees, drugs). After this you should use formulas to extract the year, month, and day of week from the incident dates. Only after all of this is done are you ready to start analyzing the data using PivotTables.
4. Use the structure provided by the grading rubric to organize your report. Have separate sections identified for each grading topic in the Rubric (e.g., administrative/offenses, temporal, geographic, etc.).
5. Work on one section of the report at a time. If you try to run all your analyses first you will probably get overwhelmed by the stack of findings you generate. Indeed, it usually works better to reverse things: figure out what you want to say or comment on and then conduct only those analyses pertaining to that topic. Once you have your findings immediately write them up while they are fresh in your mind. Do this for each section for the report, drafting one section at a time. Once you have done all of the sections go back and polish the overall writing.
6. You need to analyze the data for your entire “state” and all years – you cannot just isolate your analyses to one city alone for a single year.
7. Don’t spend all of your time making charts and tables: remember that you only need three of each. If you give us more we will still only grade the three best. Instead, once you have the minimum number of charts and tables focus on your writing within each section.
8. Reports always look and read better when the author uses a consistent structure and formatting. This means that all of your charts and tables should use a common color, font, and title scheme. Similarly, you should develop a pattern to how you write up each section of the report in text. Always start out by giving your reader an orientation to the section and what you hope to accomplish (e.g., “This section of the report examines…..”). When you present numbers develop a common format that you try to stick with throughout the report (e.g., “Regarding the gender of the 125 arrestees, 36.0% (n = 45) were female…..”). It also helps to provide explanations of the statistics you use; help people understand how to interpret your findings (e.g., “Comparing cities to one another using simple crime counts can be misleading if the cities in question have very different populations….”).
The final paper must be a single MS Word document that you upload through D2L’s DropBox folder for this assignment. You will also upload your answer sheet at the same time using the same DropBox folder.
DO NOT email the files to me or a Teaching Assistant because: a) they might get missed, and b) this will make it difficult for us to the assignment using the grading rubric in D2L.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
– Can I choose my own crime problem, city, or state? Can I use other datasets I find?
The answer to all these questions is NO: You will be assigned a specific type of crime/problem and you have been given all the data you need for the project. There is no need to find other datasets on the internet.
– Can I immediately narrow down my focus to a single type of offense or single city?
NO. You need to analyze all of the data for your state throughout the report and that includes all the different types of assaults. It is only at the very end of the report that you make suggestions about a narrowed target area based on the findings from your analyses.
– Why do we have the ‘answer sheet’ and are these the only analyses we need to do?
The answer sheet covers 35 distinct questions about your assigned state. We use this to verify that you know how to analyze the data accurately. Some of the items on the sheet might get used in your final report, others might not. You will definitely need to do additional analyses, however, if you want to earn a good grade.
– Can I include more than 3 tables and 3 charts into my report?
YES, most students add more to make their report complete. At the same time, we only grade what we consider to be the three best charts and three best tables. In the end it is better to have a smaller number of really well designed charts/tables than a whole bunch of mediocre ones.
– I prefer making tables and charts to writing: do I need to have text paragraphs?
YOU MOST CERTAINLY DO. The charts and tables are graded independently. After that everything is based on your writing. No writing, no points on the rubric.
– Should I have different sections in my report? How should I structure the report?
PLEASE DO. In this report you will be presenting analyses on a variety of different aspects of your assigned crime problem. You will tell your audience how many criminal incidents there were, where these happened, when they happened, who was involved as victims and offenders, and the different types of property involved. These topics should be separated from one another in your report with some type of organizational structure. Probably the best idea is to use the grading rubric for the section names and overall order of the sections.
– Why is my computer or D2L telling me that my file is too big to upload?
Remember from earlier modules that we need you to use “edit….paste special….pictures” when you transfer charts and tables from Excel into either PowerPoint or Word. If you do not do this correctly your Word file may grow too large to submit through D2L. This happens because behind the scene when you paste your chart (incorrectly) it is actually copying the whole Excel dataset into MS Word. So, make sure you put charts and tables into Word the right way, as pictures.
– My computer crashed and I lost my report just before I was about to upload it to D2L. Can I have an extension?
NO (sorry). You need to develop and use safe computing practices in this class and as a professional working in the field. That means back up your report every 15 minutes that you work on it (I’ve saved the current document I’m writing four times already). You should also back up your report on an external source like a USB drive, hard drive, or the cloud. You simply cannot rely on your main computer’s hard drive to keep your work safe.
– Is it OK to use my final Strategic Crime Report in job applications to demonstrate what I can do in MS Excel and Word?
ABSOLUTELY. Think of this report as a Capstone for this class, potentially even your entire CCJ major. When done well, the Module 4 report can showcase to a potential employer the kind of work you are capable of doing. Here’s an example of a student being successful in this regard: http://www.pdx.edu/psu-online/advance-your-career
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