New crime analysis center hits ground running - Scranton Times-Tribune

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A new academic lab at the University of Scranton will soon delve through stacks of police reports to spot trends in city burglaries.

The project comes as one of the first major collaborations between the city’s Police Department and the university’s Center for the Analysis and Prevention of Crime. The reports provided to the data analysis laboratory contain information on burglaries from the first six months of 2017, Police Chief Carl Graziano said.

“We sent them a few hundred incident reports, so they’re doing some evaluation for burglaries for us,” Graziano said.

Headed by the center’s executive director, Michael Jenkins, Ph.D., who is also a criminal justice professor, a handful of students plan to work during the winter intersession to look for correlations among where the burglaries are occurring and at what time.

“At this point, it’s going to be a geographic analysis to see if there’s any concentrations of burglaries in areas of the city as well as time of day,” Jenkins said.

The university in July announced the launch of the academic lab with the promise it will marry crime data analysis and mapping for practical purposes.

The center serves as a learning tool for criminal justice students and as a complement for in-house analysis efforts for local police and social service organizations.

In the fall, the center completed a shorter project for the city and examined calls for service for the police, Graziano said. It showed most calls to the police came between 2 and 6 p.m.

It was information the police previously had, but the center “freshened up the data” for the department, Graziano said.

For the students, the center has provided real-world experiences about actual police work, including being able to go to headquarters and meet with Graziano, Jenkins said.

Results of research conducted by faculty and staff would be shared with the department, but Jenkins said there are no plans to publish at this time.

Jenkins said that in the spring, once the burglary project is complete, a handful of students and the police chief may travel to Washington, D.C., to present their efforts in a congressional briefing.

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jkohut@timesshamrock.com;

570-348-9144;

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