We plan to work on FBI UCR data. Specifically, we want to focus on the data related to violent crime. We want to combine violent crime data for multiple years (for example, from 2010 to 2019). To give an example of the violent crime data in a particular year, this link provides the comprehensive data about violent crime in 2019: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/violent-crime. So far, we have firstly picked several aspects to start our analysis. Similarly, while analyzing the aspects that are described below, we are going to combine data from multiple years. Here, we just use the data from 2019 as an example to explain what aspects we are now considering.
Now, some of our purposes of this project are:
1. Find out if there are certain patterns for the four different violent crimes and if we can use any methods to predict and prevent certain types of crime.
2. Find out if there are certain connections between the different violent crimes.
3. Find out if certain states have the higher crime rate than others and if there are any signs indicating the ascending/descending crime rate.
4. Find out the trend in 5 years, 10 years, and maybe even 20 years, and figure out the social/ financial/ political context that leads to the situation. At the current stage, we focus on several tables including “Table 1” (whose link is https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-1), “Table 5” (whose link is https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-5), “Table 20” (whose link is https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-20), “Table 21” (whose link is https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-21), and “Table 22” (whose link is https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-22). “Table 1” provides the number of cases for all types of violent crime from 2000 to 2019, while “Table 5” provides the number of cases for all types of violent crime in each area and in each state in 2019. Besides, each of Table 20, 21, 22, and 24 contains the data about weapon presented in the case of murder (“Table 20”), robbery (“Table 21”) and aggravated assault (“Table 22”). By using these types of tables and combining them from different years, we can start our project by addressing the following questions: 1. For each type of violent crime, what is the trend of occurring frequency? In particular, what does the trend look like by consecutive years? States? We can observe the trends by plotting line graphs. We can also mix the information by using facet_warp. Besides, other basic questions can be: How a certain type of weapons presents differently (in frequency for example) regarding different types of violent crime? For a certain type of violent crime, which type of weapons presents most frequently? Least frequently? Is one type of weapon always the most frequent one? Based on these basic analysis, we may want to explore more patterns once we find something interesting from the results.
The collection of this data is part of the FBI’s nationwide program called the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program (“Services”). The program began in 1930 and has been ongoing since then (“Services”). According to “Uniform Crime Reports”, “Each month, law enforcement agencies report the number of known index crimes in their jurisdiction to FBI.” The agencies have the choice of whether or not reporting the data to the program (“Services”). The FBI checks the data given to them and comes out annually and quarterly with reports and tables summarizing the data they have received (“About the UCR Program”). The data and reports they come up with are open resources that the public can access through their website, the goal of which is to compile and provide credible data and statistics about crime around the United States (“About the UCR Program”). According to “About the UCR Program”, the data has played an important role, and used by professionals in many fields such as criminology and sociology.
Are we able to load/clean the data:
1. We are able to load the data by using (readxl) package.
2. For Table 1/20/21/22, we can eliminate the title and the comments when we upload the excel.
3. For Table 5, since the data is already aggregated, we need to unfold the aggregation first.
4. All the tables need us to handle the issue of abnormal values, or characters, especially footnotes.
Challenges we foresee:
1. The data comes from the single source, so the data might not be absolutely complete and accurate.
2. There are some limitations for the access of certain data, and we might need to create a database by ourselves in order to have a quicker and better access process.
3. The analysis methods we’ve learned so far are limited. In order to have a comprehensive analysis of the violent crime methods, we need to use some outside resources and learn other methods (we might need learn certain techniques of data visualization to handle the analysis/ outcome in a more intuitive way).
4. For the rape data, it shows that it has a “revised definition” and “legacy definition” (“Rape”). The different understanding about the same term/ category might lead to the different result of data collection and thus different analysis outcome.
5. For “Table 2”, the footnotes show that “[t]he figures shown in this column for the offense of rape were estimated using the revised Uniform Crime Reporting definition of rape”, and thus the data is not fully accurate.
Reference:
“About the UCR Program.” FBI, https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/ucr/about-the-ucr-program.pdf/view. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Rape.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/rape. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Services.” FBI, https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Table 1.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-1. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Table 2.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-2. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Table 5.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-5. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Table 20.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-20. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Table 21.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-21. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Table 22.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-22. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Uniform Crime Reports.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Crime_Reports. Accessed 12 March 2021.
“Violent Crime.” FBI:UCR, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/violent-crime. Accessed 12 March 2021.