Notes for learning and applying R to questions about crime and the justice system
Best viewed at the R4crim github.io site
These notes form the basis of Penn Criminology's Criminal Justice Data Science course that I have taught since 2014. Students code in R to answer questions like
- What happens to crime when big movies come out?
- Where are Chicago's crime hotspots?
- Which crimes happen inside LA's gang injunction areas?
- If the police shoot someone, do they tranfer them to the nearest hospital?
On the way to answering these questions students learn about
- regular expressions
- SQL
- web scraping
- parallel processing
- geographic data
- official data sources (NIBRS, NCVS, ACS), and
- a variety of data and coding skills
Table of contents
- Intro to R
- Dates and times
- Working with NIBRS data (replacing the older notes on Working with UCR data)
- Working with NCVS data
- Regular expressions
- Introduction to SQL, Part 1
- Crime hotspot maps
- Introduction to SQL, Part 2
- Webscraping and Parallel Processing
- PPD shootings extracting from text geocoding
- Working with geographic data