R4crim

Notes for learning and applying R to questions about crime and the justice system

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R4crim

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

1. Intro to R
2. Dates and times
3. Working with NIBRS data (replacing the older notes on Working with UCR data)
4. Working with NCVS data
5. Regular expressions
6. Introduction to SQL, Part 1
7. Crime hotspot maps
8. Introduction to SQL, Part 2
9. Webscraping and Parallel Processing
10. PPD shootings extracting from text geocoding
11. Working with geographic data