The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act) requires postsecondary institutions that receive federal funding to disclose data regarding crimes that occur on campus. While the act is an important...
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The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (Clery Act) requires postsecondary institutions that receive federal funding to disclose data regarding crimes that occur on campus. While the act is an important piece of legislation, its impact is severely hampered by the fact that schools fail to provide accurate numbers, likely because the incidents are never reported by the students, or because the schools are not honest in their reporting. The former occurs frequently, and there are numerous well-documented cases of the latter, which have resulted in noncompliance fines.

This issue is particularly problematic when it comes to rape, where underreporting is commonplace. Previous investigations have emphasized that Clery Act data are at odds with more realistic numbers:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/campus-crime-statistics-undercount-sexual-assaults

http://www.aauw.org/article/clery-act-data-analysis/

In this post, I’ve mapped the Clery Act data published in 2015, for incidents occurring during the 2014 calendar year. Overall, more than 90% of institutions reported zero alleged rapes, and less than 1% reported more than 10. I summed the number of reports of alleged rape on campuses by state, then calculated rates per 10,000 postsecondary students. The results are striking: rates of alleged rape are significantly higher in New England than anywhere else in the country. At the opposite end of the spectrum are states like Arizona, Texas, California, and Florida, which host some of the largest universities in the country.

So what is happening? Do Ivy League universities like Brown, Dartmouth, and Harvard (all of which are among the top six schools with the most individual reports) really have more incidents of rape and sexual assault? Or is it that students at those schools are more inclined to report the incidents? Or are the schools more honest in their reporting? Of course, I don’t have an answer for any of these questions, but I find it exceedingly hard to believe that there were fewer than ten rapes at schools with tens of thousands of students like Texas A&M, Arizona State University, Florida International University, and University of Florida.

On a final note, I find it somewhat ironic that the two schools with the highest rates of reported alleged rape are:

1. Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family: five reports among 64 students, for a rate of 781 per 10,000.

2. Brite Divinity School: nine reports among 196 students, for a rate of 459 per 10,000.

Data source: http://ope.ed.gov/security/

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been rating movies for almost 50 years. The ratings we are most familiar with today (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17) provide general guidelines for the minimum ages of viewers (though many would...
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The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been rating movies for almost 50 years. The ratings we are most familiar with today (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17) provide general guidelines for the minimum ages of viewers (though many would disagree with ratings for particular films). In addition to the letter rating, the MPAA writes a brief, sometimes comical, justification for ratings above G, identifying what in the film would not be suitable for all children.

Using data from IMDB, I ran a word frequency analysis on the ratings of 15,715 movies, binned by rating. The histogram shows the usage frequency of the 21 words that occur in >10% of explanations for at least one rating category. For example, the word “language” appears in the rating description of 62.5% of PG, 47.8% of PG-13, 80.9% of R, and 3.0% of NC-17 movies. Common words (e.g., articles, prepositions, conjunctions) were excluded.

While I find word clouds to be completely useless as a tool for conveying statistical significance, I wanted to provide a larger selection of common words in ratings. As word clouds are more attractive than lists, I’ve generated one for each rating. The NC-17 cloud is smaller because there are few films in this category, and thus there was a smaller pool of common words.

A few fun facts:

-The word “explicit” appears in 58.2% of NC-17 ratings, but only 0.1% of R ratings. Conversely, “mild” is used in 53.2% of PG ratings, but only 0.2% of PG-13 ratings.

-While “sexual” is common in PG-13 (29.7%), R (26.2%), and NC-17 (41.8%) rating descriptions, “sexuality” frequently occurs only in R (32.4%) and NC-17 (34.3%) films; in PG-13, “sexuality” is observed only 7.5% of the time.

-“Violence” is the only word to be used in >20% of each of the four ratings, peaking at 56.8% in R-rated movies.

Data source: http://www.imdb.com/interfaces (plain text data files)

The recent series of high-profile killings of black persons by police officers (i.e., Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, and John Crawford III) is, to say the least, saddening and troubling. Without getting too deep into the issues...
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The recent series of high-profile killings of black persons by police officers (i.e., Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, and John Crawford III) is, to say the least, saddening and troubling. Without getting too deep into the issues at hand, I thought I’d just show the data for what they are. This graphic depicts the relationship between the police presence in a city (officers per 1k population) and the black and/or African American representation (% of city population). The data include 100 of the largest US cities – all have at least 200k people. The strong correlation, though not surprising, is certainly disappointing. Maps are provided for viewing the geographic distribution of each variable independently.

Data sources:

http://factfinder2.census.gov/ (ACS 2013, 1-yr, B02001)

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/police-employee-data/browse-by/city-agency

Using 2012 data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, I’ve graphed select offenses by age and gender. The top graphs show, for women and men separately, a timeseries of the number of people arrested by age from 15-24. Outside this age...
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Using 2012 data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, I’ve graphed select offenses by age and gender.

The top graphs show, for women and men separately, a timeseries of the number of people arrested by age from 15-24. Outside this age range, the FBI compiles the data into greater than one year bins. The scales on the graphs are identical, so you can compare curves for a given offense between the sexes. Not surprisingly, the arrest numbers for men are higher, but the order of which offenses are most common is not the same, and the shapes of the curves differ.

The lower graph shows the gender balance of arrests for a given type of offense. Offenders of all ages are included in these data. The highest percentage for men is forcible rape (99.1%); for women, it’s prostitution (67.7%). The closest offense to an even split is embezzlement (51.6% of arrests are men).

Offenses that include violence generally have higher percentages of male arrests. For example, larceny is only 56.9% male arrests, but robbery is 87% male arrests. Overall, violent crimes are 80.1% male arrests, while property crimes are 62.6% male arrests. The gender balance for all arrests is 73.8% male.

Data source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/persons-arrested/persons-arrested (Tables 39, 40, and 42)

This pair of maps shows data from 2012 on property and violent crime by state. The top map highlights the total crime rates (property crimes + violent crimes per 1,000 people). The bottom map reveals the number of property crimes committed per...
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This pair of maps shows data from 2012 on property and violent crime by state. The top map highlights the total crime rates (property crimes + violent crimes per 1,000 people). The bottom map reveals the number of property crimes committed per violent crime.

Data source: http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/