let's talk about crime

Have you ever wondered how vacant buildings impact crime? I had wondered that so during my senior year at Texas A&M when I was named an Undergraduate Research Scholar I knew exactly what I wanted to research. The thesis I submitted at the end of that year was titled: The Relationship Between Crime and Vacant Buildings in the City of Chicago. When I started this research project I was not sure what the end conclusion would be - or honestly if there would even be a substantive conclusion. The process of conducting this research taught me to trust data and let it tell me the story instead of asking the data to fit my narrative. It taught me self-discipline and deepened my love of finding answers.

I started my research by mapping all of the crimes and vacant buildings in a year time span in Chicago. Then I sorted and mapped the Top 5 crimes the city saw in that year. The Top 5 crimes occurred 9,572 times total and were:

• Theft: 33.6%
• Battery: 25.8%
• Criminal Damage: 16.2%
• Narcotics: 16%
• Assault: 8.4%

I then mapped the Top 5 crimes against vacant buildings were a previous crime had already occurred. Then I placed a 250 yard buffer around all of those vacant structures and mapped only the crimes that fell within that buffer. Within that buffer 4,372 crimes occurred in that year. The percentages in the buffer were:

• Theft: 15.9%
• Battery: 23.4%
• Criminal Damage: 12.2%
• Narcotics: 40%
• Assault: 8.2%

I then spoke to particular neighborhoods and demographics. My main conclusions was that 45.7% of the Top 5 crimes in Chicago that year occurred within 250 yards of an abandoned building where a crime had previously occurred. I still remember the joy of the moment all my data had finished running and I realized I had a concrete, valuable conclusion.

The experience of being an Undergraduate Research Scholar taught me to ask hard questions and the discipline to do research on my own time. In developing my research I was not completely certain how I would answer the question. It was not until about half way through that I thought to buffer properties and zero in on structures with repetitive crime. Conducting this project helped me learn to follow the data and trust that trends will develop. It also taught me how to write a thesis under the direction of a professor and gave me experience in presenting and defending my own individual research. This has proven to be an invaluable experience and has deepened my love of research. It will help me in my future job by becoming someone who doesn't just ask hard questions but someone who seeks to answers them as well.