Juvenile Crime rates and Violent Adult Crime By Noel Williams

Research Question  I wanted to explore the relationship between juvenile crime and adult violent crimes in Central New York in the past few years. I also wanted to understand the impact that poverty rates played on both violent and juvenile crime rates, if any.

Literature Review  “White, Black and Latino Homicide Rates”: Racial differences exist in the United states in terms of violent crime rates, specifically homicide rates. Researchers suggest that this is mostly in part due to structural disadvantages such as unemployment and poverty that minorities face more frequently than whites.  “Youth Guns and Violent Crimes”: Youth crime spikes tell us a lot about the reasons youth commit crimes. The rise of different drug markets, the ease of access of handguns and subpar economies all aid in juvenile delinquency rates. The changing world means that juvenile crime trends are always changing as well  “Misdemeanor Policing”: The Broken Windows theory of crime where it is believed that the stricter policing of “smaller” misdemeanors leads to a more lawful community. Most of the time Juveniles are the ones that the police use as “examples” for these misdemeanors and lead to lower arrest rates for violent crimes.

Literature Review Continued  “Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime”: This research suggests that moving families with middle to older age teenagers to low-poverty neighborhoods decreases the chances of juvenile arrests by 50%. This offers statistical data that suggests poverty is a key factor in determining crime rates of an area  “Banning Juvenile Gun Possession”: Many politicians and lawmakers have implemented gun control laws that aim to take guns of the streets. While the idea is solid, the outcomes of the laws are overwhelmingly negative in that they have no significance in reducing street un violence or violent crime

Works Cited  Blumstein, A.. (2002). Youth, Guns, and Violent Crime. The Future of Children, 12(2), 39– / http://doi.org/  Cerdá, M., Tracy, M., Messner, S. F., Vlahov, D., Tardiff, K., & Galea, S.. (2009). Misdemeanor Policing, Physical Disorder, and Gun-related Homicide: A Spatial Analytic Test of "Broken- Windows" Theory. Epidemiology, 20(4), 533–541. Retrieved from  Ludwig, J. (n.d.). Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence From a Randomized Housing – Mobility Experiment. Retrieved April 28, 2016, from  Marvell, T. B.. (2001). The Impact of Banning Juvenile Gun Possession. The Journal of Law & Economics, 44(S2), 691–713.  Phillips, J. A.. (2002). White, Black, and Latino Homicide Rates: Why the Difference?. Social Problems,49(3), 349–373.

Data Sources Used   US Census   New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services

Data Analysis  First I copied my two data sets into Excel Juvenile CrimeAdult Crime

 I chose to focus on Central New York counties: Cayuga, Cortland, Madison, Onondaga and Oswego. The crimes I wanted to focus on were mainly violent crimes reported to the police. The violent crimes are Murder, Rape, Robbery, Assault, Burglary, Larceny and Motor Vehicle Theft

 From here, I highlighted my data and inserted a pivot table for each dataset onto a new sheet. I organized the tables with the report filter as the year, Row labels were the counties, Column labels as each of the violent crimes for both juvenile and adult arrests.  Then I converted the raw numbers into % of column because I wanted to focus on how each county compares to the others in regards to violent crimes. Juvenile Arrests Adult Arrests

Here we can see both of the total numbers for Juvenile and Adult arrests. Obviously here the adult numbers are much higher so let’s take population into account but only for the year 2010, as that’s the most recent year the US had a full census.

Here I took each of the raw numbers and divided them by the population of each county and multiplied by 100. Now we have fully cooked crime rates

Here is a visual representation of both arrest rates. Although the actual rates are very different between the two groups, there seems to be a close correlation between counties and crime rates.

 Now I wanted to look at how poverty levels may play into the arrest rates of each county. I looked up poverty rates for each county on the US census and found them for I then took these numbers and put them into my original data so that I would be able to put it all in a pivot table

“Sum of Index” and “Total” are the total Violent crimes for each group There appears to be some strong correlation between age groups within each county, but each crime rate is different between counties

Findings  Based on the numbers and graphs I found that there was a correlation between the crime rates of both Juveniles and Adults within each county.  Contrary to what I predicted however, poverty levels did not appear to play as strong a role in Central New York