Analyzing Crime Rates: Learning from LA Program in Miami

Data Analysis

Two weeks after you have taken on a job as an analyst for the City of Miami, the Mayor’s office comes to you with the following problem. There has been a discussion about whether the city should support the crime prevention program “Learning from LA,” targeting assaults and theft crimes.

The program would involve the exchange of officers, joint planning sessions and CompStat-like data-driven review meetings, as well as the training of Miami officers in Los Angeles.

The idea is to learn best practices from the police department in Los Angeles, which has been known to be effective in preventing crimes and clearing cases. The program, however, is quite expensive, and though the Chief of the Miami Police Department fully supports it, there has also been criticism.

An influential council man, who has been involved in Miami politics for a couple of decades, stated the following:

“This program would be an unnecessary expense. Everybody knows that Miami has done a great job decreasing its crimes rates during the last couple of years. There is nothing really to learn from a city like Los Angeles of all places.

We don’t have the time and money to send our officers on a paid vacation to California.” The mayor wants you to provide some greater insights on this issue; he says: “I want to know whether L.A. has really done better than we have and whether the program would be worth it.

Crunch the numbers and tell me what you think. Go to the following websites and create a data table in Excel: Use the tables “Crime rates in … by Year” from the websites and create a table with five columns.

The first column should display the years, the other four columns should show the “assault” and “theft” data for both cities and each year. Make sure you use the “Per 100,000 Pop” data (the numbers in parentheses), which standardize the crime data and, therefore, make them comparable.

Create two charts that compare crime trends across cities. Label the charts in a meaningful way. For example, the x-axis should show the years 2006–2019.

Determine the average growth rates for each crime category and compare them across cities. Determine whether the crime rate differences between cities are statistically significant.

Run two t-tests to compare the average crime rates for assaults and thefts across cities. Requirements You will work on this assignment in groups, which I will randomly create. You can contact your group members (see the project groups) when clicking on “people” in the Canvas course navigation menu.

Produce a 2-page memo for the mayor. The memo should include the main results from your analysis, interpretations of the findings, and your recommendation to the mayor as to whether or not she should support the “Learning from LA” program or not.

The memo needs to be readable, clear, and well structured. Be creative when formatting the memo to make sure that it is easy for the mayor to quickly grasp its major points. The memo should have an appealing layout.

There is little need to include tables or raw data. It should be sufficient if you show the two charts and report the most important numbers as a part of the text. Regarding the t-test, for example, it is sufficient to report the two means and the associated p-values. Selecting and incorporating the relevant statistics is a part of the challenge of this assignment.