Which county is safer?
Module Assignment 1
In 2014, I moved from the Chicago suburbs to Westminster, Colorado. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to compare the different types of crime data between Adams County (Westminster) and Boulder County, and see how they change over the years. So, I looked at the crimes involving drugs and crimes against people and then asked myself: Based on these factors, which county is safer? What might have caused these fluctuations?
The first comparison I made was drug/narcotic violations in both Adams and Boulder County between 2014 and 2020. As for Adams County, there was a significant decline in these violations, amounting to a remarkable 18.81 percent reduction, from 2,813, to 2,283. However in Boulder County, there was an 11.1 percent decrease in drug violations, from 726, to 641. This downward trend could reflect a positive shift in societal safety and security during those years, or the effects of covid and quarantine. With everyone staying in doors in 2020, I think it’s likely the latter. After examining the total number of violations over all Colorado counties, giving a bigger sample size, it was made clear that covid was probably a key factor. In fact, from 2014 to 2019 there seemed to be a steady increase of drug violations at an average of around 2000, starting at 15,452 and ending at 21,938. Then all of the sudden in 2020 they saw a large drop down to 14,684. So far just looking at the raw data, it seems like Adams County has the least amount of crimes involving drugs, because although its total is larger, the square mileage of the county is and the percent reduction seems to be greater.
Next up, I shifted over to crimes against people, which instantly shockced me. There seemed to be a stark contrast in comparison to the decline mentioned earlier. When the data was summed per year, there was a slow rise to the number of crimes committed against people. Over all of the counties, the total in 2014 stood at 51,273 compared to an astounding 65,590 in 2020. So why would this be the case? Based off of the previous data it would be expected that crimes against people would go down in 2020, just like the drug violations. As a result of this, I decided to go deeper and see what the numbers looked like in Adams County and Boulder County. To my surprise, there was a 143.8 percent increase in crimes against people in 2020 compared to 2014. Similarly, Boulder County had 143.27, which was extremely close to the growth in Adams County. In 2014, 9839 of these crimes occurred in Adams County, which then rose to 14,149 six years later. Comparatively, Boulder County began at 2,265, and made its way to 3,245. There were two very compelling insights that came from this. One, the increased number of crimes against people in both counties was nearly identical. This basically made the data useless in answering the question of which county is safer. Although, it posed a new question: Why did crimes against people increase while the number of drug violations decreased over the same period of time? Again, I thought that covid had a role to play in this fluctuation. A possible reason could be that economic hardships, loss of jobs, and other issues could have caused a rise in stress among people which ultimately shot up crime rates. It’s hard to say exactly why this happened because there seems to be a pretty steady increase over the year, but it’s safe to assume that covid probably contributed to it based off of the data for drug violations.
In conclusion, it’s hard to give an exact answer to which county is safer due to the rise of crime against people, but from the other data we do have, it seems like Adams county is safer when it comes to crime. From 2014 to 2020, drug violations decreased and crimes against individuals rose significantly. Its apparent that the pandemic had an impact, but it also seems that other factors may have had a part in these fluctuations. To comprehensively assess safety, more data is needed from a variety of categories, but from the given data its certain to say Adams County is safer.
