Monday, November 3, 2014

Final Project Proposal


                For our Choropleth Lab I had done the violent crimes per capita of the 50 states.  To expand on my initial map I will be delving more in depth by mapping violent crime as of 2012 in the mid-Atlantic region by county.  

                The United States Geological Survey classifies the mid-Atlantic as Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.  This is a total of 327 counties.  As these are the most likely states for local travel, I would want to know which counties have the most violent crime.  As someone who likes to avoid violent crime, it would be beneficial to know where exactly to avoid.

                I would utilize the Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics which was created by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.  This crime report houses data from almost two decades back.   However, the most recent data is most complete when it comes to county by county statistics.

                Data permitting, I will expand my view of states to North Carolina, Ohio, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  This would bring up the total to 542 counties.  If these states are complete I will incorporate the location of the schools in the A10.  This theoretically would add a new element of not just knowing which counties to avoid, but also showing which schools lie in counties that are more prone to violent crimes.  

                This project is exciting in that it could expand even further.  It could include moving to violent crime data by county for the entire east coast or the United States as a whole.  The data set from the FBI also provides other crime data so that with future projects can map larcenies, robberies, sexual crimes, murders, and other derivatives of violent crime.  It allows the ability to not only analyze the crimes but predict where crimes will most likely occur.  

Crime data such as this can be both useful not for domestic knowledge, but also with decision makers deciding on financial budgets nationwide.




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