My name is Conor Loy ’20, a Denison Data Analytics major. I spent this past summer at Cambridge University in England doing data consulting for the Police Executive program at the Insitute of Criminology. I ended up meeting with 26 students at Cambridge, and am continuing to work on one project looking at the correlation between street checks and charges.
We worked on all kinds of police data sets. My main data set contains information about street checks and charges in western Canada. My analysis involved bringing multiple large, very messy data sets together, filtering out irrelevant rows, and working from there to do analysis. I analyzed how the number of street checks correlate to charge rates, either before or after a street check. This involved marking when charges occurred with respect to every street check, before or after, and the time elapsed between street checks and charges. I also worked on analyzing patterns of hate crime in London, finding hot spots for different kinds of hate crime and trying to find a common theme among high rate areas. All statistical work I did was with non-parametric tests.
Some other topics under consideration were police perception of self before and after police school, patterns among police who are charged with sexual misconduct, and the effectiveness of police rehab camps for child delinquents.
As a result of my work, I expect to get published in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing. I also attended a conference for evidence based policing and was able to network with multiple people from other fields, opening the door to future internships or jobs.