So I have various updates on my CRIME De-Coder consulting site, as well as new posts on the American Society of Evidence Based Policing Criminal Justician series.
CRIME De-Coder
Blog post, Don’t use percent change for crime data, use this stat instead. I have written a bunch here about using Poisson Z-scores, so if you are reading this it is probably old news. Do us all a favor and in your Compstat reports drop ridiculous percent change metrics with low baselines, and use 2 * ( sqrt(Current) - sqrt(Past) ).
Blog post, Dashboards should be up to date. I will have a more techy blog post here on my love/hate relationship with dashboards (most of the time static reports are a better solution). But one scenario they do make sense is for public facing dashboards, but they should be up to date. The “free” versions of popular tools (Tableau, PowerBI) don’t allow you to link to a source dataset and get auto-updated, so you see many old dashboards out of date online. If you contract with me, I can automate it so it is up to date and doesn’t rely on an analyst manually updating the information.
Demo page – that page currently includes demonstrations for:
The WDD Tool is pure javascript – picking up more of that slowly (the Folium map has a few javascript listener hacks to get it to look the way I want). As a reference for web development, I like Jon Duckett’s three books (HTML, javascript, PHP).
Ultimately too much stuff to learn, but on the agenda are figuring out google cloud compute + cloud databases a bit more thoroughly. Then maybe add some PHP to my CRIME De-Coder site (a nicer contact me form, auto-update sitemap, and rss feed). I also want to learn how to make ArcGIS dashboards as well.
Criminal Justician
The newest post is Situational crime prevention and offender planning – discussing one of my favorite examples of crime prevention through environmental design (on suicide prevention) and how it is a signal about offender behavior that goes beyond simplistic impulsive behavior. I then relate this back to current discussion of preventing mass shootings.
If you have ideas about potential posts for the society (or this blog or crime de-coders blog), always feel free to make a pitch
Andrew Wheeler 