Police funding and reducing crime

[BBarr-PDAP]

Someone has requested help on a data project:

Submission notes

Can we find data to determine whether putting more funding in to conventional policing (e.g., staffing, equipment, training, etc.) is effective in reducing crime? What are the cost to alternatives?

Location

Pittsburgh, PA or comparable cities

Requirements

Overlapping budget and crime data from multiple years in multiple cities

How to help

Leave a comment if you'd like to help. Do you have ideas, questions, or need any more information to get started?

[josh-chamberlain]

There's a municipal data scraper for PA here, that could help get budgets: Police-Data-Accessibility-Project/scrapers#240

Crime data is usually easy to find: https://data-sources.pdap.io/search/crime/pennsylvania

So, if we have municipal data over a long enough time range, we could correlations...cause is more difficult to understand. Analysts would probably want to look at a few case studies, and explore calls for service too.