Introduction
Hello! Our names are Tin Bui and Emma Speyrer. The purpose of this website is to display our overarching research project for the first-year engineering programming course at Notre Dame. We chose to do a project based on the crime and educational environments in Chicago and see how they correlate. The idea of this project topic was inspired by Emma's literature course, called Multiethnic Literature of Chicago. Therefore, we want to create an interdisciplinary project which uses information from one class to learn in another. With that, we hope you enjoy what we created!
Findings
The goal of this project is to show a correlation between an inadequate educational environment and a higher crime rate. Therefore, we want to show that educational opportunities across the City of Chicago are not equal and are contributing to the systemic nature of the crime. The major question we plan on answering is: do educational environments affect the crime rates of the City of Chicago. After going through the process of researching and building visizations, we realize that there are lots of external forces that affect crime in a certain area, especially in big cities. Therefore, we found more connections and commonalities than actual correlations when analyzing the data. However ,these findings still give a glimpse of the environment and forces that contribute to systemic crime in certain areas. The graphs based on the educational profiles done by the Chicago Public School District shows that schools in different areas of Chicago are vastly unequal. There are more lower rated schools in the West Side and southern sides of Chicago than the northern sides and Central Sides of Chicago. This disparity in education is also portrayed by the fact that the southern sides and West Side have a larger percentage of adults under the age of 25, who have not received their high school diplomas. There also is an economic disparity between the West Side and southern sides compared with the northern side and Central Side of Chicago, which can contribute to the schools in those areas being more or less funded than others. Nevertheless, the resources in less funded schools will have more limited resources and the facilities might not be as up-to-date, causing the education environment to be less inviting and effective. Leading into the crime data analysis, we found the most frequent crime that occurred in more affluent areas economically was theft. In the Northwest Side of Chicago, which is less economically affluent, the most frequent crimes, mostly theft or battery, were closer in percentage than in other northern sides or the Central Side of Chicago. The Northwest Side also had more Level 2/Level +2 (which lower rated schools) than the other northern sides. While in the southern sides and West Side of Chicago, the most frequent type of crime was battery and other residential crimes. We predicted that we would see this kind of trend due to the two different types of crime frequency by wards graphs that we had made. With one of these graphs. We had specified the location of crimes to limit the number of tourist based crimes, while the other one portrayed the raw data. The two graphs showed the crime in the southern sides and West Side did not change significantly or at all. In certain northern sides and the Central Side of Chicago, their frequency of crime went down. This decrease in crime we attributed to be caused by these areas having highly touristy areas or large transportation centers in those areas. Therefore, we can see a connection between the fact that the schools in the southern sides and West Side tend to be lower rated and likely receive less funding might contribute to there being more frequent residential crime in those areas. To be able to make this connection into a correlation, we would need to have more data to be able situate where the person who committed the crime is from, to able the individual educational experiences of the person and board set of skills as data and statistical analyzers. However, by understanding that there might be a connection, we can look for what are the external factors that caused there to be connection. For example, what causes the West Side and southern sides to be less economically affluent, why are some schools in these regions not getting as much resources or how does a neighborhood environment affect how a kid views safety and their future.