A battle between schools
When it comes to the rivalry between the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Colorado State, it’s quite obvious that the Buffs have the Rams beat in things like football, outdoor activities, views, and much more. Although I may have some bias. But besides those factors in choosing one of these Colorado schools to attend, what if someone is considering the risk of getting COVID? Which school has less crimes? And is there any correlation between COVID and these crimes?
Well, first off, let’s take a look at the data. For this project I decided to use the data set that included Colorado counties and information about their COVID cases as well as the csv that showed the number of crimes in different Colorado counties over the years. The first csv has information like the number of cases and deaths for each county. However the second one had information about crimes against person and crimes against property for each of the counties. I thought it would be interesting to see what relationships these two datasets had with each other.
Boulder county had 14,702 COVID cases in 2020 and then jumped a drastic amount to 25,086 the next year in 2021. This was probably a result of the quick spread of the virus around the world.
Then, in 2022, we see a decrease in cases all the way down to 10,802. That’s even less than 2020! So what was the cause for this? I decided to do some research to find out. One likely reason for this is the increase in vaccinations in Colorado from 25% of the population in March of 2021 to 75% in January of 2022 (Usafacts, Colorado Coronavirus Vaccination Progress). Although I was expecting a decrease in cases after the introduction of the vaccine, I didn’t think that it would be able to work as quickly as it did.
Next, I turned over to the crime dataset. Looking at Boulder County, from 2020 to 2021 the total crimes against people were 3245 and 3492 respectively. Only a small rise. However, crimes against property was a different story. There were 869 crimes against property in 2020 and 587 crimes in 2021. Was this due to the increase in COVID cases? I’ll get to that part later. Over the years there seemed to be a steady increase in crimes against people in Boulder. Why? Well it’s likely due to an increase in population in Boulder County. But what confused me is why it continued to rise in 2020 and 2021. I expected the lock down to have an effect on crime but so far there was no sign that it did. My prediction for crimes against property for the years 2020 and 2021 were correct though. From 2008 to 2019 property crimes in Boulder seemed to have no specific pattern and moved all over the place. Fast forward to 2020 and 2021, and low and behold. Crimes against property significantly dropped by a little over 90 percent! All the way from 5,724 to 587, the decrease in property crimes seemed like it had to be related to COVID. The timing can’t be a coincidence.
Now let’s look at Larimer County, the county Fort Collins is part of. As for the number of COVID cases from 2020 to 2022, there was a big difference from Boulder’s. Starting at 15099 cases in 2020 the county then jumped all the way up to 35089. That’s just a little bit over ten thousand more cases! I wanted to do some more research to see why this was. I found the after action report for Larimer county during COVID, and saw a possible reason for the jump in cases in 2021. Although vaccines were being pushed out, around this time, around October the Delta variant was spreading around and there was an overflow of people in hospitals (Larimer County Health Department, Covid-19 after Action Report — Larimer County Department of Health and Environment). This was intriguing. However, Larimer did have a similar decrease as Boulder because in 2022 they fell to 11210 cases which was only about 400 more than the number of cases Boulder had in 2022. So far it’s looking like Larimer had more of an issue with COVID than Boulder. What did the crime side of things look like?
In 2019, Larimer’s number of crimes against persons was at 2905. Nothing too crazy. However I found it weird that from 2019 to 2021 that only dropped to 2771. I thought that there would be a much greater decrease because of the lock down in 2020. Yet again, I was surprised by the fact that crimes against property told a different story. There was a small drop from 2019 to 2020 as crimes against property went from 5599 to 4618. What stood out to me is that there was a large increase in cases from 2020 to 2021. They jumped up to 7484! How could the number of crimes increase from lock down? Wouldn’t everyone be inside and be worried about the virus?
In the middle of the coding process I thought it would be a good idea to see what correlations there were between the datasets. It didn’t look at all like I thought it would. Let’s start with the correlation between crimes against person and COVID cases. A measly -0.0584. How was there no correlation between these? After looking at the graphs of the data I thought that there had to be some kind of negative correlation because as the number of crimes went up on the COVID cases went down. But I guess there was no relationship there. However, crimes against property presented itself in a more predictable way. With essentially no correlation at -0.08129, this made sense because the graphs showed a huge decline in COVID cases as crimes against property began to rise. There had to be some sort of correlation between the data so I kept looking. This time around I wanted to know if there was any correlation between crimes against people/property and COVID deaths. Once again, no correlation was spotted. Crimes against person and COVID deaths had a correlation of -0.0609, so basically no correlation. Similarly, crimes against property had an even smaller one at -0.00838. Although the code says that there weren’t any correlations I still believed that there may have been a small one. It seems logical to believe that crime would decrease overall as the number of COVID cases increased because everyone was quarantined and staying away from the public.
Moving on to the comparative analysis between Boulder and Larimer Counties, I had some interesting findings. The first being a comparison of COVID cases over time. Although in 2020 and 2022 both counties were very close to each other, Larimer had just a little bit more than Boulder. When it came to 2021 there was a HUGE difference. Larimer had over ten thousand more cases! One point for Boulder! Next: Crimes against property over time. On average, between 2012 and 2018, Boulder seems to have a couple thousand more than Larimer per year, but in 2020 Boulder has a significant drop, and conversely Larimer has a massive spike. Another point for Boulder! Finally, crimes against person. In 2008, Larimer started off with over 1500 more crimes than Boulder. But twelve years later, Boulder jumps up to 3500 leaving Larimer around 2700. One point to Larimer! Just comparing these statistics, so far it looks like Boulder County is a winner! There seems to be less COVID cases and crime rates in Boulder. So if you’re looking for a little bit of a safer place, then Boulder County is the better choice here.
A lot was extracted from these two datasets, however, there were some limitations and challenges. For example, the data only showed the number of crimes and COVID cases per county when for my case, it would’ve been a little more helpful to have specific towns such as Fort Collins. Both Larimer and Boulder county cover a large amount of land so it was hard to precisely compare Fort Collins to Boulder. Another limitation was that the covid cases data only spanned from 2019 to 2022. This made it impossible to compare the number of crimes before 2019 to the number of covid cases before 2019 because the dataset that contained all the crimes went back to 2008.
In conclusion, it is evident that from 2019–2022 Larimer County had more covid cases than Boulder, and as of recently, Larimer also has more crimes against property than Boulder. Although Boulder does have slightly more crimes against person than Larimer, it seems clear that if you’re looking for a county that has less COVID cases and crime rates, then Boulder is the place to be. Sko Buffs!
Works Cited
Larimer County Health Department. “Covid-19 after Action Report — Larimer County Department of Health and Environment.” Issuu, 30 Sept. 2022, issuu.com/larimerhealthdept/docs/final_lcdhe_after-action_report_covid-19_pandemic_.
“Understanding the COVID-19 Pandemic in Colorado.” USAFacts, 9 Dec. 2023, usafacts.org/issues/coronavirus/state/colorado/.
