Multivariate temporal modeling of crime with dynamic linear models.

Nathaniel Garton,Jarad Niemi,Tzai-Hung Wen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0218375

Abstract

Interest in modeling contemporary crime trends, a task that has historically been considered valuable to the public, researchers, and policymakers, is resurging. Advancements in criminology have made it clear that understanding crime trends necessarily involves understanding trends in how likely individuals are to report crimes to the police, as well as how likely the police are to accurately record those crimes. In this paper, we use dynamic linear models to simultaneously model the time series for several crime types in order to gain insight into trends in crime and crime reporting. We analyze crime data from Chicago spanning 2007 through 2016 and show how correlations in the way crime trends evolve may contain information about drivers of crime and crime reporting. We provide evidence of substantial differences in the relationships between the trends of crimes of different types depending on whether crimes are violent or nonviolent and whether or not crimes are tracked in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

Highlights

In the 2018 Annual Review of Criminology Baumer et al state in their paper, “Bringing Crime Trends Back into Criminology: A Critical Assessment of the Literature and a Blueprint for Future Inquiry,” a surprising fact: that “the study of crime trends is not part of mainstream criminological theory or research” [1]
Though there has been some research on contemporary crime trends, with respect to this research the authors note a number of issues including little attention to differences in crime trends based on crime type
They note that crime trends can depend heavily on the data source, and they cite an example of how police data from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) has, in the past, differed from that of data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): a difference that has previously been noted and analyzed [2]

Summary

Introduction

In the 2018 Annual Review of Criminology Baumer et al state in their paper, “Bringing Crime Trends Back into Criminology: A Critical Assessment of the Literature and a Blueprint for Future Inquiry,” a surprising fact: that “the study of crime trends is not part of mainstream criminological theory or research” [1]. The above model allows us to smooth the time series and to make inference about the dependencies in the trends as well as residual errors, but including an annual seasonal component should allow for a more precise estimate of the trends, and hopefully of correlation parameters.

Results

Conclusion