Crime and violence experienced by individuals living in a community are important public health issues since people who survived from violent crime may endure not only physical pain and suffering but also mental distress and reduced quality of life. (McCollister 2009) Although according to the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent and property crime rates have shown dramatic declines in the U.S. since the early 1990s when crime spiked across much of the nation, we think people should pay more attention to crime and violence and address these problems as public health issues. As a group of international students living in St.Paul for about three to four years, we are particularly interested analyzing the crime data in the City of St Paul.
To explore and investigate crime rates in Saint Paul, we combined two datasets into our final dataset, the crime incident report released by Saint Paul Police Department for the purpose of more transparent public information and the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Neighborhoods profiles provided by Minnesota Compass, which is a social indicators project that tracks trends in topic areas such as economy and education in the state of Minnesota. The crime incident report records reported incidents from August 14, 2014 through the most recent available in the City of Saint Paul, including the specific neighborhoods and blocks where the incidents happened and the call dispositions for each incident. Different incidents are grouped into 17 types of incidents including “Homicide,” “Rape,” “Robbery,” “Aggravated Domestic Assault,” “Aggravated Assualt,” “Domestic Assaults,” “Criminal Damage,” “Arson,” “Burglary,” “Theft,” “Auto Theft,” “Narcotics,” “Firearm Discharges,” “Community Engagement Event,” “Proactive Police Visit,” “Graffiti,” and “Vandalism.” The Minneapolis-Saint Paul Neighborhoods profiles provide demographic information for the 17 neighborhoods in Saint Paul for the year 2019, including but not limited to the total population, income level, education level, percentage of different race, and employment status in each of the 17 neighborhoods.