- Project Prospectus
Our collaborative group project was centered around Los Angeles Crime Data from 2020 to the Present day and had variables based upon area, district, type of crime, victim age, victim sex, victim race, crime premise (The type of structure, vehicle, or location where the crime took place), weapon used, the status of the case, the crime code (1-4 with 4 being the most serious), location in street address, cross street, as well as latitude and longitude. The dataset had in total 28 different columns and over 1,000,000 entries.
In our group, we divided the work among four members with 3 being responsible for slides, data analysis, and the netphi document and 1 for managing the project.
Initially, we chose to explore the problem statement of: “Which neighborhoods in LA experience the highest crime rates, and how do these correlate with socioeconomic indicators?” Our initial hypothesis was that yes, areas with a lower average income will have a higher level of reported crime.
- Methods
The two methods we chose to handle this task were Poirier's: Connotative Reading as well as Koopman's: Critical normative evaluation. We chose Poiriers initially to figure out what neighborhoods have the highest rates of crime to then utilize that data in order to compare it with socioeconomic data for the regions and see if they correlate. On top of that, Koopman's critical normative evaluation we were going to use to see if existing stereotypes about Los Angeles neighborhoods were related to such crimes.
- Works Performed
Unfortunately, as time went on we alternated to a Poiriers deconstructive reading due to the fact that we discovered the data has major discrepancies in it hinting at falsifications in the data.
- Findings
Evidence for this is the fact that regions like Topanga, with a population of just 8000 in a relatively mountainous region had an amount of crimes committed identical to areas like West LA with a population of 840,400 highlighting a statistical impossibility that also doesn't match up whatsoever with news reportings of topanga being one of the lowest crime areas in Los Angeles.
Our group project looked at crime data in Los Angeles from 2020 to today to see if lower-income areas have higher crime rates. But after finding issues in the data, like small areas showing the same crime numbers as much larger ones, we changed our approach to focus on whether the data itself could be trusted.
