A commercially available crime index may be a reliable alternative to actual census-tract crime in an urban area

Abstract

Health research on the effects of crime has been hampered by a lack of small-scale, reliable crime data. Our objective is to assess the accuracy of a set of commercially available crime indices for use in health research. The 2016 release of Applied Geographic Solutions’ (AGS) crime indices are based on data from 2010 to 2014 and provide tract-level information on crime.We use crime rates for 1069 tracts of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) jurisdiction for the same years to assess (1) Spearman Correlations of major crime categories, and (2) accuracy of AGS indices in predicting falling above/below the median and into the highest/lowest quartile of LAPD crime. We also test if adding variables from the American Community Survey (ACS) to regression analyses can help to reduce measurement bias.We found that five of ten AGS indices correlated moderately well with LAPD crime. In unadjusted regressions, robbery, homicide, aggravated assault, motor-vehicle theft and personal crime achieved c-statistics from 0.81 to 0.90. C-statistics improved up to 0.13 points after adding ACS variables. Some AGS crime indices may be reliable proxies for crime in an urban area. The AGS index for total crime, most commonly used in prior research, performed poorly.

Basic Environmental Supports for Positive Brain and Cognitive Development in the First Year of Life

“…PSD was quantified using a structural equation model-derived factor previously described and validated, composed of household income, caretaker education, insurance status, area deprivation index, and diet (Supplement 1). Derived based on a priori hypotheses building on the extant literature, the T-factor was composed of (1) the Child Opportunity Index education domain at birth and 4, 8, and 12 months, as a measure of environmental stimulation, (2) Infant Feeding Questionnaire–Revised at 4, 8, and 12 months and the eating subscale from Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA) at 12 months as a measure of nutrition, (3) violent crime rates based on US census block information from 4, 8, and 12 months as a measure of neighborhood safety, (4) objective coding of parent-child interaction tasks at 12 months as a measure of positive caregiving, and (5) sleep problems measured using the ITSEA sleep subscale at 12 months as a measure of child sleep (Figure 2). The 3 domains with more than 1 measure (ie, environmental stimulation, nutrition, and neighborhood safety) were estimated using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (eFigure 1 in Supplement 1).…”

Population and Neighborhood Correlates of Cannabis Dispensary Locations in Oklahoma

“…These data use several years of crime reports from law enforcement jurisdictions across the U.S. We used the total crime rate for 2020 due to unstable numbers in many rural census tracts. These data have been shown to be a reliable choice for use in public health analysis ( Nau et al, 2020 ).…”

Characterizing the neighborhood risk environment in multisite clinic-based cohort studies: A practical geocoding and data linkages protocol for protected health information

“…In this example protocol, two neighborhood crime indices–a Murder Rate Index and an Assault Rate Index–are obtained from Business Analyst because of their known associations with HIV outcomes [ 37 – 40 ]. Business Analyst derives its data from Applied Geographic Solutions (AGS) CrimeRisk© indices (Applied Geographic Solutions, 2020B) [ 41 , 42 ] which are based on FBI Uniform Crime Reports and local police departments. Other crime indices include, but are not limited to, Rape, Burglary, and Motor Vehicle Theft Indices and composite indices of Personal, Property, and Total Crime.…”