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, OATH, Open data portals), and
• a variety of data and coding skills

Table of contents

1. Intro to R and US protests
2. Dates and times and New York City summonses
3. Regular expressions
4. Working with the National Crime Victimization Survey data
5. Working with the National Incident-Based Reporting System and SQL databases
6. Open data portals and mapping Chicago crime hotspots
7. Webscraping, parallel processing, and the effect of movies on crime
8. Extracting data from text, geocoding, and Philadelphia police shootings
9. Working with geographic data and Los Angeles gang injunctions