Crime in Metropolitan America: Patterns and Trends Across the Southern California Landscape, 2005-2012

This study collected and combined data from a large number of sources (e.g. crime data, land use data, parolee data, business and employment data, etc.) to study crime and crime trends across two counties in Southern California: Los Angeles and Orange counties. The crime data comes from a number of police agencies for the years 2005-12. Crime data is not available for all cities for all years. The variables from other sources are for the year 2010. All data is aggregated to the common geographic unit of census tracts. The data come from the following sources: 1) crime data from police agencies; 2) socio-demographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS) obtained from ICPSR; 3) business data from Mint data; 4) land use data from the Southern California Association of Governments; 5) voluntary organization data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics.

This wide array of information allows accounting for the multi-dimensional and inter-related sources of crime and crime trends in Southern California in neighborhoods (census tracts). Using these data, the project: 1) built a model to predict crime in small geographic areas; 2) assessed the effect of neighborhood organizations and institutions on crime rates; 3) determined the effect of the spatial distribution of poverty (at both small and large scales) on crime rates; 4) assessed how the clustering of social problems in a neighborhood affects neighborhood crime over time. This project built on prior work done by the Metropolitan Futures Initiative (MFI) team to locate various data sources in Southern California.