NSF Award
1439453
Crime records are housed in hundreds of counties across the nation, each employing local laws and idiosyncratic information management systems. As a result, it is difficult to analyze detailed crime records across time and place. To address this challenge, the researcher proposes to build a database for integrating 23 million crime records in Houston, NY and Miami. The researcher proposes a workshop strategy to address three distinct aims: 1) Build an interdisciplinary community including statisticians, criminologists, legal scholars, behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, economists, sociologists and programmers, all of whom share an interest in the intersection of crime and their fields. 2) Work with the community to prototype a database of deep criminal records obtained via public access laws. 3) Work with the community to design advanced interface and visualization tools for the data, opening the data to the widest possible audience. <br/><br/>This project builds capacity for data-intensive research on national criminal records, guided at all stages by the stakeholder research communities. Previously, criminal research has relied on the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, a tool with two weaknesses: no unique identifiers to identify re-offense rates, and a lack of detail that dilutes the ability to use 21st century tools and analysis techniques. The project breaks the information bottleneck by building a community of quantitative researchers - from a range of disciplines in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences - with a shared interest in next-generation questions at the intersection of crime and their fields. Through multiple workshops, the community establishes database ontologies and prototypes a transformative database of millions of criminal records spanning several decades (obtained via public access laws). The researchers also implement advanced interface and visualization tools to maximize the user audience for the database. This project provides an unprecedented level of detail about offenders, their crimes, and their interactions with the criminal justice system. By enabling an exploration of the relationships between external factors like legal policies and a decision to commit a crime, this project promises results across and beyond the contributing disciplines. Critically, the prototype database will include anonymized identifiers to enable exploration of desistance from crime, greatly advancing the study of recidivism (reoffenses). Such advances should in turn help efforts to identify high-risk offenders, allowing policy makers to base law enforcement decisions on direct, proven, open-source assessments of human behavior.
