Tag Archives: crime

Gloom over Mexico’s booming metropolis

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As Mexico's wealthiest urban area, Monterrey is a symbol of the country's aspirations, with a well-educated workforce, leading universities, thousands of U.S. and other foreign business executives, and a per capita income twice the national average. But today the city is at the front of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's U.S.-backed drug war, and its future is clouded by lawlessness. As one top executive here said, "If Monterrey is lost, all is lost."

[Link to Gloom over Mexico's booming metropolis]

Social Outcomes and Height of the Building

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Point: The idea that descendants of African slaves are the only people in the history of our species to be done in by the configuration of architectural blueprints is mistaken.

It was much, much more complicated than that: the culprit was aspects of social history in America starting in the late sixties, not merely how housing projects were constructed and how far their doors happened to be from the street.

John McWhorter at the New Republic argues against the commonly held perception that crimes and social conditions are worse off in taller public housing than low-rises. I don’t understand the Sonia Sotomayor connection though and it seems forced in order to attract eyeballs.

Measuring and Assigning Crime Rate

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Currently, I’m compiling crime rates for cities in a particular county. Although not a perfect solution, I plan to assign the crime rates measured at jurisdictional level (often city/town/village level) to the residential properties within that jurisdiction. Also, it turns out that the data available from FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) is based on voluntary reporting by these jurisdictions and not all cities in the county have reported their numbers. Roughly 30-40% of jurisdictions have reported their numbers.

Additionally, the crimes occurring in unincorporated cities are responded to by the county police and are not supplied with no spatial context. Crimes reported by county police are in aggregate figures and include figures from different corners of their jurisdiction which often are spatially separated by dozens of miles thus assigning crime rates from a country police department to all residential properties within the county might be erroneous.

My solution – assigning crime rates to all properties within jurisdictions whose crime rates are available through FBI UCR with their corresponding figures. For properties that lie in jurisdictions that haven’t contributed to FBI’s UCR, I relate them to the nearest jurisdiction that has reported their numbers and use those crime numbers after weighting them by population of the jurisdiction they lie in.

Thoughts? Opinions? Alternate solutions