Sociology- Criminology

Week Two Assignment-International Crimes and Statistics.

Statistics are looked at in a variety of ways and used to show how crime increases and decreases over time.  This assignment is meant to have you explore a variety of statistics related to crimes and victimization in the United States and other countries.  Below are a variety of websites that will be your starting point for this assignment. 

For the US, you can use:

https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/crimestats

Here is the Philadelphia Police crime statistics

http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/pa/philadelphia/crime/ (Links to an external site.)

For other countries, you can use:

http://www.nationmaster.com/ (Links to an external site.)

You can explore the crime statistics in different countries around the world. 

http://www.icc-cpi.int/EN_Menus/icc/Pages/default.aspx (Links to an external site.)

Step One:  Brainstorm 3 crimes that you would be interested in doing research on (Think about what types of crimes you want to look at and why?  Think about who might be a victim of these crimes, for example, age, gender, race, etc?  Think about how these crimes are reported (for example, is it self-reporting, police, etc)? (10 points)

Step Two: Select at least 3 countries that you want to explore crime statistics (this will allow you to think about which countries you might be interested in looking at for your semester long prison assignment).  When you think about the crimes, are the crimes treated the same in each country?  For example, is there a “UCR- Uniform Crime Report type listing for all the countries you selected or is it classified differently? (15 points)

Step Three:  Begin looking at the websites provided as well as exploring other ones to see how hard or easy it is to find statistics on the crimes you want to do your research on.  While you are exploring the websites, please note the difficulties you are having.  This is an important part of the assignment.  Statistics are used throughout the world to report on the safety of cities and countries however some websites are difficult to follow.  (25 points)

Step Four (Write up):  For each site that you use, you need to write a 1-2 page summary of information you researched (Total pages 3-6 pages).  You can include statistics (but please summarize them)  For each site, considering what you have learned in this chapter about crime victimization, what measures can you take to better protect yourself from crime? What was the most interesting crime statistics that you discovered? Why?  For each section, explain how the crimes were presented.  Also, explain any problems you encountered when doing your research.  You are looking for crime trends and it NEEDS to be in your own words or you will get NO credit.  Also, make sure you cite all of your work (50 points)

Please note that this assignment is meant to be used to explore and understand how statistics are reported and you are not expected to be a “master” of understanding statistics.  When doing any research, there are steps that need to be taken to gather the information that you are looking at.  If you decide to ask specific questions, list the  key terms you use and the results you gathered.