Crime and the scientific method

From the procedurals and documentaries that populate streaming services to the oppositional catch phrases that dominate political debates, crime is a constant theme in the US discourse. But beyond entertainment and politics, there is the reality of crime, and understanding this reality is where the Department of Criminology in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences comes in.

“Penn, going back a hundred years, has been in the mode of good data collection and scientific method in studying criminology,” says Greg Ridgeway, professor and department chair, who also holds an appointment in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at the Wharton School.

This “scientification” of criminology, as Ridgeway puts it, carries across a range of projects undertaken by the interdisciplinary faculty of the department, from analyzing the propensity of police officers to fire their guns to examining street lighting’s effect on crime. 

“Science would say that if you are a chemist, biologist, or physicist, you would conduct a controlled experiment,” says Ridgeway, who worked at Microsoft Research in the late ’90s, where he helped to pioneer algorithms that would recommend content to users—work reflected in seven patents that he holds. “For example, we can’t necessarily randomize where to locate a homeless shelter, but in the city of Vancouver, each winter, they relocate their emergency winter shelters, so we can take that information and look at what happened before, during, and after the shelter was present at any given location, and then use that information to try to understand issues of public safety around those places.” This can inform policy and planning.

Large datasets—prosecutorial records, police misconduct histories, gun violence rates, and more—are an invaluable resource for modern criminologists, and Ridgeway’s own research explores the use of big data to improve policing.

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