Picturing JQC’s Future

Abstract

Like AI Blumstein, I came to criminology via operations research (OR) and, earlier, via electrical engineering, when I was engaged in designing a radio system for the Boston Police Department (Maitz and Waldron 1968; Maitz 1970). I subsequently became an OR analyst for the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (now NIJ) in 1969. After 3 years of seasoning, I started teaching criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (now UIC without the Circle1). There I taught inter alia undergraduate and graduate statistics and research methods. Having never taken them, I had to learn them on the fly. But like most engineers, I had a strong background in dealing with data, so it was not too problematic.2 But I brought different ways of looking at data (with an emphasis on the word look). Engineers and most hard scientists are taught to plot the data as they collect them. In physics we added weights to a spring and plotted the spring's length against the applied weight; we dropped an object and plotted the time it takes to fall different distances. It is through such exercises that we were able to demonstrate the linear relationship in the first example and the quadratic relationship in the second. In becoming a criminologist, however, I found that I had to deal with different types of data, for the most part based on random samples. The National Crime Survey (NCS), and its successor, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NVCS), were based on samples, as were a number of other important data sets. I set out to learn the methods of dealing with