Strategic Crime Report - Analyzing Crimes in or Around Bars

For this assignment you are going to bring together all of the new analytic skills you have learned to address a specific crime problem. This term, we will be exploring crimes that have happened in or around a bar. 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 happening in a bar. 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 offense within a bar. 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.

The first component of the SCR is the answer sheet. Provided in Week 7, the answer sheet includes 35 analytical questions that span all of the skills we have learned over the first half of this term. You will need to reference your formula sheet, and may need to review videos and lessons from earlier weeks to refresh your memory.

You will approach these questions in relation to your assigned state, making sure to calculate each answer to the appropriate number of decimal places, and making sure to format the response correctly. If the answer asks for a percentage, be sure to include the percent symbol, and round your response to one decimal (45.6%). Type your responses into your answer sheet, then submit your responses via the Canvas Strategic Crime Report Quiz Module. Rather than the multiple choice quiz responses we’re used to, you will have a short answer space to type in your response – this is because all answers will be different, depending on your assigned state.

You may only complete your SCR answer sheet quiz once. You will have one hour to enter the 35 responses from the time you begin. You may not resubmit your quiz if you realize you made a calculation error, so please use your in-class time wisely to ask questions and ensure you are confident in your responses.

Part I - Strategic Crime Report Answer Sheet

Once you have calculated answers to your strategic crime report answer sheet questions, you will need to write up a summary report. This should be written as a stand-alone document in MS Word or MS PowerPoint (you will choose one or the other type of final report – either a written report or a presentation, not both), with incorporated graphs and tables (minimum of 3 each). The document should look and read like a professional report.

There is no page/slide maximum or minimum, and no preference whether you single or double space your written content. Note that in written reports, high-quality past submissions typically average between 10 and 15 pages, with 8 as a minimum page count for quality writing, and 20 pages on the upper limit. You may use what you feel is necessary to complete the task. Should you choose to complete a presentation, your length will depend on your formatting choices. You have been provided with a template for both the written report and formal presentation, so this may help to structure your work.

Strategic Crime Report Considerations

As with any paper or report it is important to first establish who your audience is. In this case you may imagine that the report has been requested by the Governor’s Crime Prevention Task Force. They plan to design and implement a strategic intervention addressing events occurring in bars. 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 your Teaching Assistant to ask for clarification before you put a lot of work into something that might be way off target.

Part II - Strategic Crime Report (or presentation)

2. Use the built-in opportunities to keep on track, such as attending class and office hours with questions, and making sure you’ve submitted drafts as requested, on time.

3. Get started early – you can’t do a good job on this report in a single day or at the last minute. You have

4 weeks to complete all materials related to this project. This is enough time if you work consistently on this work each week.

4. 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.

5. 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.). Ensure that your report follows the same order as the grading rubric. Use the provided templates to help guide your work.

6. 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 work.

7. You need to analyze the data for your entire “state” and all years – you cannot just isolate your analyses to one city alone, or a single year.

8. 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 three. Instead, once you have the minimum number of charts and tables focus on your writing within each section.

9. 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., “Considering the 125 arrestees, 36.0% (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. Therefore, the crime rate is a useful metric….”).