Go to the above link, and find the violent crime rate for any of the following:- Murder
- Forcible Rape
- Robbery
- Aggravated assault
- Burglary
for the United States and for one local area. You may choose the city of New Brunswick or the Middlesex-Monmouth-Ocean-Somerset area, or another local area. You may pick any local area in the U.S. Look over charts 1, 1A and 6. You may also find other helpful information in some of the other charts to make your story better.
Write a story based on these statistics, but make sure you include comments from authorities who can speak with some expertise. You may include comments from nonexperts Use your judgment. Also, make a simple chart of statistics to go with your story. It can be hand drawn, done in a word-processing program, or in a desktop-publishing program.
Note that you can download these charts into Excel and make comparisons of numbers. For instance, comparisons of crime rates to various locales and to the nation or region, and comparisons of rates of different types of crime to each other. For example, has the murder rate skyrocketed while the aggravated assault rate has dropped? Why? If Excel intimidates you, you can find the rates just with a calculator. If the crime rate in a certain area was 69 last year and became 83 this year, simply subtract 69 from 83, get 14 and divide it by 69. You find that crime has gone up 20.28 percent, which you can round to 20 percent. If crime went from 83 to 69, you now find the difference, get -14, divide 14 by 83 and find that crime declined 16.86 percent or about 17 percent.
Learn who are the right people to speak to. Try not to fall over other students in the class pursuing this story. Remember there will be 20-plus students out there looking for the same story. Make sure your approach is unique.
What are the values of crime-rate stories? Why is it important to know that the number of murders has gone over 100 in a certain locale? Why do cities have higher rates?
Make sure your story has links to various sites where the reader can learn more.
You should read some stories about crime statistics before you launch in to this assignment. Here are a few links, but don't feel that reading these covers the subject. You should go online and find more.
2. This
Fox News story has a lot of links in it. Make sure you read them too.
3.
This is about crime in the U.K.
5.
This article discusses how crime statistics can change peoples' viewpoint about race.
6. Here is
a story that shows how crime statistics can make or break an entire perception about a neighborhood.
