This semester I am teaching a new undergrad course, communities and crime. Still a few seats left if you are a UT Dallas student and still interested. (You can also audit the course as well even if you are not a UT Dallas student.)

You can see the syllabus from the linked page, but compared to other syllabi I’ve found floating around, (see Dan O’Brien or Elizabeth Groff for two undergrad examples) I focus more on micro places than others. Some syllabi I’ve found spend basically the whole semester on social disorganization, which I think is excessive.

One experiment I am going to try for this course is to use Dallas Open crime data, and then have the students make predictions. For example, for their first assignment they are supposed to make their prediction based on social disorganization theory what neighborhood has the most crime in Dallas from this neighborhood map in Dallas. (Fusion table embedding not working in my WordPress post at the moment for some reason!)

These neighborhoods were obtained from Jane Massey, a researcher for the Dallas area Habitat for Humanity. Hence why the flood plain is its own neighborhood. It is the most reasonable source I’ve seen so far. Most generally agree (see Dallas Magazine for one example), but that data is not very tidy. See this web app to draw your own neighborhood in Dallas as well. And of course for students interested part of the discussion will be about how you define a neighborhood.