Assignment Overview
In this assignment, you will investigate how crime is measured in the United States and then use those measurements to think like an analyst: not just reporting a number but explaining why it looks the way it does. The assignment has three connected parts. In Part 1, you will explain how crime data is collected and why that matters. In Part 2, you will pull real data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) to compare two cities. In Part 3, you will take whichever city showed the higher crime rate in Part 2 and conduct a short Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on it, so your analysis in Part 3 grows directly out of the data you gathered in Part 2, rather than requiring a separate case.
You will need to reference the FBI's Crime in the United States data throughout this assignment:
Crime in the U.S. 2019: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/violent-crime
Table 5 -Crime in the United States by State
Table 8 -Offenses Known to Law Enforcement by City, 10,000 and over in Population
Part 1: Understanding How Crime Is Measured
Respond to the following three prompts in paragraph form (not a list of separate answers). Your response should be 250-400 words total, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt, with in-text citations and a reference page in APA format.
Compare the Uniform Crime Report (UCR/NIBRS) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): how does each one gather its data, and what does that method reveal or fail to reveal about the true extent of crime in society?
Explain how self-report data adds information that official sources like the UCR and NCVS miss, and describe one strength and one limitation shared by all three data sources (UCR/NIBRS, NCVS, and self-report).
Based on the above, which data source would you rely on for this report, and why?
Assignment Overview
In this assignment, you will investigate how crime is measured in the United States and then use those measurements to think like an analyst: not just reporting a number but explaining why it looks the way it does. The assignment has three connected parts. In Part 1, you will explain how crime data is collected and why that matters. In Part 2, you will pull real data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) to compare two cities. In Part 3, you will take whichever city showed the higher crime rate in Part 2 and conduct a short Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on it, so your analysis in Part 3 grows directly out of the data you gathered in Part 2, rather than requiring a separate case.
You will need to reference the FBI's Crime in the United States data throughout this assignment:
Crime in the U.S. 2019: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/violent-crime
Table 5 -Crime in the United States by State
Table 8 -Offenses Known to Law Enforcement by City, 10,000 and over in Population
Part 1: Understanding How Crime Is Measured
Respond to the following three prompts in paragraph form (not a list of separate answers). Your response should be 250-400 words total, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt, with in-text citations and a reference page in APA format.
Compare the Uniform Crime Report (UCR/NIBRS) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): how does each one gather its data, and what does that method reveal or fail to reveal about the true extent of crime in society?
Explain how self-report data adds information that official sources like the UCR and NCVS miss, and describe one strength and one limitation shared by all three data sources (UCR/NIBRS, NCVS, and self-report).
Based on the above, which data source would you rely on for this report, and why?