MS, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Information Technology

It is the fact that crime affects all aspects of human life. Shooting crime has long been a major and serious problem of some US cities. According to 2017 national statistics, Cleveland was ranked as the 5th, Cincinnati as the 9th, and Columbus as the 21st deadliest city in the US. The analysis of any historical crime data reveals that crime is non-randomly distributed in time and space. Based on this notion, hot spots policing has gained its momentum to effectively predict future crime locations and to direct limited resources of the police to the places where the need is greatest. Hots spots policing approach tries to predict shooting locations ahead of time to increase the quality of life. Recent studies; however, pointed out that traditional hot spots policing occasionally predict rare crimes such as homicides and shootings due to their less frequent recurring counts in a given place and time (specifically for shorter time periods such as weeks and months). Given this context, we developed a new shooting prediction system (SHOPS) to explore whether recent dynamic/mobility activity patterns of known violent individuals increase the prediction of short-term fatal and non-fatal shootings compared to the traditional hot spots policing. Findings suggest that SHOPS predicts fatal and non-fatal shooting locations more precisely by identifying fewer hotspot locations. Policy implications of the study were discussed in the conclusion section.

Master of Science in Criminal Justice (MSCJ), Bowling Green State University, 2010, Criminal Justice

Scholars have long been interested in the study of corporate crime. The current financial crisis caused by widespread defaults on sub-prime mortgages brings a renewed call for understanding the significant harms produced by reckless corporate practices. This thesis utilizes a multiple case study approach to examine four major corporate scandals throughout American history. These cases include Cooke & Co. and Northern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s, the Insull utility holding companies in the 1930s, the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s, and the Enron scandal in 2001. A macro-social adaptation of Sherman's (1978) examination of corrupt police organizations is used as a logical model to analyze the cases using cross-case synthesis. The four cases are compared using the framework to uncover common patterns of reactions to major corporate crimes. The thesis concludes with a discussion of various policy alternatives for handling complex corporate crime problems, including a guide for future research.

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2023, Psychology

This current study investigates the relationship between sexist beliefs, self-objectification, and fear of crime. In addition, the researchers sought to investigate whether these social attitudes would predict trustworthiness ratings of male faces. In part one, survey responses from 52 participants were collected. In part two, 45 participants were exposed to a crime salience manipulation before rating the trustworthiness of a series of male faces. We ran bivariate correlations between the predictor variables to confirm existing relationships as seen in the literature regarding the development of the scales as well as the research used well after the scales were developed. The results confirmed these existing relationships and revealed a significant negative relationship between fear of crime and body shame, as well as a significant positive relationship between right-wing political ideology and hostile sexism. In part two, those who were exposed to the crime salience manipulation agreed more with the results of the crime-centered poll if they scored high in fear of crime rather than low. Those exposed to the control condition showed no difference in agreement whether low or high in fear of crime. A 4-way interaction was also found between the dichotomized fear of crime variable, the manipulation condition, face model type, and the amount of manipulation applied to faces. For trust model-derived faces, trustworthiness ratings increased in a linear progression as more information was applied. However, for dominance model-derived faces, trust judgments increased in a curvilinear progression. Trust ratings peaked at the mid-level of information and were the lowest at the highest level of information.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2022, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Antitrust offenses are an important form of white-collar crime. They exemplify Sutherland's definition of white-collar crime as an offense “committed by people of high social status in the course of their occupation.” These offenses impose substantial economic harm, reducing competition and innovation. Yet, women in antitrust violations have received limited attention from researchers regarding their prevalence and roles. As such, this dissertation hopes to explore and shed light on women in antitrust violations in the United States through an opportunity perspective. This project creates a database and uses content analysis to collect information on schemes, cases, and entities. Antitrust cases were drawn from the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice and filed from January 1st, 1990, to December 31st, 2018. Cases were selected according to the following criteria. They 1) have an antitrust or related violation, 2) are criminal or civil, and 3) have at least one female defendant. Then, related cases were grouped into schemes for analysis. An additional sample of male-only cases was drawn using random sampling stratified by years to create a control sample. All court documents and supplemental information gathered from online searches were reviewed and coded into variables. There are four groups of variables in the coding scheme: 1) case information, 2) documentation, 3) defendant information, and 4) organizational information. Additional employment statistics are collected for selected industries. Overall, during the study period, 54 female antitrust offenders in 41 schemes were identified. The analyses explore gender differences in patterns within schemes, industries, occupational positions, and roles in the conspiracy. First and foremost, very few women are involved in antitrust offenses. No scheme is a woman-only conspiracy. Female presence is sporadic between 1990 – 2018. Moreover, the analyses revealed similarities and differences in t (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Public Health, The Ohio State University, 2021, Public Health

Violence against humans is a public health issue, as is violence against animals, because these two forms of violence have been scientifically linked together. Violence against animals, known as animal cruelty, has been shown to be an important predictor and correlate of aggressive, violent behavior toward people and additional animal victims. Characteristics of individuals who are violent toward animals and people are similar and important to identify to help prevent further suffering and pain to victims. As such, understanding animal cruelty may assist in the prevention and alleviation of violent acts toward people. Animal cruelty laws with high offense degrees and penalties have been recently accepted into Ohio law, most notably Goddard's Law in 2016. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first study to examine animal cruelty and violent crime public court records in Ohio to investigate the association between these two crimes. A random sample of individuals found guilty of animal cruelty in Ohio was examined for violent crimes in their criminal history. A mixed-effects logistic regression model was created to model violent crime severity based on the predictors: age, race, jail time from animal cruelty offense, and timing of the animal cruelty charge in relation to Goddard's Law. Two logistic regression models were created to model being charged with a violent crime and being found guilty of a violent crime with the predictors: age, race, animal cruelty sentencing severity, and timing of the animal cruelty charge in relation to Goddard's Law. There was a high prevalence of violent offenders within the population that has been convicted of animal cruelty in Ohio. Additionally, there was a high rate at which these individuals were convicted of domestic violence, assault, endangering children, and aggravated menacing, all crimes that are related to interpersonal violence. By targeting interventions towards offenders of these crimes, the health and safe (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2019, Industrial and Systems Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

A rise in sexual violent crime at Ohio University led to this study. The purpose of this study is to analyze and determine potential associations between Ohio University students' perception of risk based on crime and lighting levels on campus, so that recommendations can be made to improve campus safety. Results from the analysis indicated that individuals related lighting levels to perceived safety but were unable to specify a crime area according to perceived risk. Recommendations include investigating lighting levels for pathways that are well traveled as well as considering other solutions preferred by students. These solutions could include a safety app that would document crime areas on campus, a nightly chaperon service, and self-defense classes for students are also recommended.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2018, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Opportunity theories of crime emphasize the importance of crime specificity, the tendency for crime to spatially cluster, and the influence that certain types of places have on the micro-level spatial distribution of crime events. Research using this theoretical framework overwhelmingly supports these assertions. However, much of this research falls short due in part to the choice of dependent variable. For instance, some research ignores the importance of crime specificity by using crime indices, which fail to account for the intricacies of criminal opportunity among crime types. Research focusing on individual crime types, such as robbery, also fail to account for within-crime type heterogeneity. Some newer research accounts for this by using disaggregated crime types, such as street, commercial, or residential robberies. That being said, how researchers define their dependent variable may influence their results and conclusions about the link between crime and place. The current study examines how sensitive spatial patterns of robberies are to different operationalizations of robbery. This study used Cincinnati Police Department robbery data from 2014 through 2016 (N = 4,066) which were then coded by Haberman et al. (forthcoming) to account for differences in victim-offender interaction and spatial environment. Using three different operationalizations of robbery, the following research questions were answered: (1) How, if at all, do different types of robbery spatially cluster? (2) Is the spatial clustering of robbery sensitive to its operationalization? (3) Is the relationship between potentially criminogenic places and robbery sensitive to its operationalization? The results suggest (1) all measures cluster spatially at small units of analysis; (2) while located in spatially proximate areas, differences were seen among the robbery measures and their clusters in terms of their makeup, where they were located, and how many clusters were formed; and (3) all m (open full item for complete abstract)

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2017, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Since place-based crime has been studied, scholars have employed a variety of ways to describe the concentration of crime at places. Most usefully, they sometimes provide a full distribution of crime across street segments, or among addresses, or other small geographic areas of interest. This is feasible if the researcher is showing the distribution of crime at places throughout one or two larger areas, such as a city. In such circumstances, a few tables or graphs will be sufficient. But once researchers started looking at spatial areas numbering in the hundreds and thousands, like street segments, then describing the internal distribution of crime within each becomes cumbersome. We need summary measures of crime concentration. The mean, median, and mode are not appropriate for this task: the first two because of the highly skewed nature of crime distributions, and while the mode is better, it does not provide enough information.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Statistics

Crime rates for small geographic areas, or domains, are often of interest in research applications. However, survey data on victimization is often not reliable at the local level; the main source of crime data in the United States, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is designed to produce national estimates only and the public-use data does not contain county identifiers. Even with county identifiers, crime is such a rare event that most sampled counties contain only a handful of victimizations at best. Crime data collected from police reports in the United States, such as in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), is widely available at the county level but excludes crimes not reported to the police. The UCR and NIBRS are meant to be censuses of all police-reported crime, but are plagued by missing and incomplete data that makes estimation challenging. This dissertation presents two methods for estimating county-level crime rates that account for both crimes reported and not reported to the police. In both methods, we take police-reported crime data from NIBRS to calculate county-level crime rates including only crimes reported to the police, then use NCVS data to estimate the percentage of crimes reported to the police in each county of interest. The difference between the two methods is the mechanism for matching NCVS records to counties, since there is no natural way of linking the two. In the first method, a resampling technique is used on NCVS records. We use American Community Survey (ACS) five-year estimates to determine the population of each county in sex by race categories, then sample NCVS records according to these proportions. We then use the sampled records to estimate the county-level police reporting rate. A negative binomial distribution can then be used to model the true number of crimes committed in a county, taking the estimated police reporting rate as the probability of succe (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, Sociology

The purpose of this research project is to examine the impact of race and ethnicity on neighborhood crime rates. Specifically, I examine the trends in rates of violent and property crime across white, black, and Latino neighborhoods. Current theoretical approaches have argued that the social structures that exist in different racial/ethnic neighborhood types are largely responsible for differences in the rates of violent and property crime experienced by the three neighborhood types. While previous studies have focused on these crime differences at the city level, I seek to examine these patterns at the neighborhood level. I analyze the level of neighborhood crime according to key sociodemographic factors that previous studies have shown play a role in the relationship between race and crime. I also take a closer look at the effect of immigration on differences in crime rates when looking just at minority neighborhoods. I use data found in the National Neighborhood Crime Survey for the years 1999, 2000, and 2001. I compare mean rates of violent and property crime for white, black, and Latino neighborhoods in general and descriptive analyses according to several sociodemographic variables (poverty, unemployment, disadvantage and residential instability). I also conduct bivariate and multivariate analyses on these independent test variables, while controlling for other variables based on previous criminological research. I find that black and Latino areas experience higher rates of violent and property crime than white areas. Furthermore, black areas have higher rates of violent and property crime than both white and Latino areas. Of key note is that Latino rates of crime are closer to those for white neighborhoods than they are for black areas. I also find that high levels of poverty, unemployment, disadvantage and residential instability are positively correlated with high rates of violent and property crime. Seeing that black neighborhoods are more likely to fal (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2006, History

The dramatic expansion of federal criminal law jurisdiction and policing responsibilities in recent times has raised questions regarding the historical origins of these developments and their impact upon the continuing efficacy of the nation's federal system of government. This dissertation examines, within the context of federal criminal law enforcement and the evolving nature of crime, those social, economic, and legal forces and events that played a critical role in the growth of the states' police powers and made federal collaboration an increasingly important factor in the suppression of crime. Since the founding of this nation, federal anti-crime legislation, which tended to be reactionary in its formulation, inconsistent in its development, and supplemental by design, implicitly embodied a policy that forbade the impairment of the powers of the states. This orientation remained a fundamental aspect of federal criminal jurisdiction until well after the New Deal, the central point of this thesis, and did not begin to change until the latter half of the century when the nation's doctrinal ties to federalism and its faith in the importance of local police powers in the constitutional balance that defined the nation's political structure were substantially weakened. The practices by which federal crime suppression policies were implemented, a factor that underscored the broad range of policing contexts with which the federal government came into contact, were used in this study as the primary means of documenting the tensions that arose between the nation's federalist principles and those national experiences that encouraged a more bureaucratic and coordinated response to crime and the threat of disorder. This literature, supplemented by secondary source material, seriously questions whether federal criminal law could ever meet the foundational requirements or offer the breadth of vision that characterize those local and state systems through which justice histori (open full item for complete abstract)

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

From the 1960s to the 1990s, murder rates in the United States nearly doubled. Starting in 1957, homicides were the lowest since World War II at a rate of 4 per 100,000. In the decade between 1963 and 1974, homicide rates zoomed from 4.6 to 9.8. They peaked in 1980 at 10.2. The homicide rate bounced down to 9.79 in 1991, only to plummet for a decade. Scholars have proposed many reasons for the surge in violence. Their theories pointed to a variety of social and psychological suspects. But they overlooked an obvious variable: urban renewal. Urban renewal was a large and expensive government effort aimed at transforming cities. It changed cities by buying properties, displacing families, demolishing buildings, and constructing places. These changes created new opportunities for offenders to find unguarded suitable targets. Its crime-creating mechanisms were removing the incentives for property owners to manage their places, shifting crime target locations, introducing users, and creating new daily routines. When urban renewal was enacted at modest levels, it did not create violence and may have protected against it. But when inflicted on a large scale, it resulted in many unnecessary killings. I reached these conclusions after conducting the first study of urban renewal's impact on homicides between 1954 and 1974. I used the following datasets: Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports, the Federal Government's Urban Renewal Directory, the Urban Renewal Characteristic Report, the County and City Data Book, New York City homicide data (Monkkonen, 2006), and Governmental Responses to Crime (Jacob, 1992). Regardless of all the social factors, urban renewal cannot be ignored as a prime suspect in the rise in crime. This dissertation contains two studies. First, I tested the impact of urban renewal on homicide rates across the United States using a negative binomial mixed model. The models showed that a city completing a f (open full item for complete abstract)

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Arts and Sciences: Geography

Drug-related crimes, involving the unlawful use, possession, production, or distribution of controlled substances with abuse potential, pose significant societal challenges. This study investigates the spatial pattern of drug-related crimes and associated factors in Cincinnati, Ohio. By employing the Huff model to capture spatial interactions in the social environment and using negative binomial regression models, the impact of Points of Interest (POIs) and composite factors on drug-related crime is explored. The comparison of three models - local, neighboring, and global - reveals that the global model demonstrates better fitness based on the Akaike Information Criterion. The analysis identifies specific types of POIs, such as ATMs and liquor stores, as positively influencing drug activity, while grocery stores exhibit a potential deterrent effect. These findings highlight the efficacy of the Huff model in aiding the analysis and prediction of factors contributing to drug crimes, thereby facilitating to an enhanced understanding of the spatial distribution of drug-related offenses.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2022, Sociology

The genre of true crime has continued to gain popularity and traction. This being said, a genre this heavily saturated has the potential to have an impact on those who consume this media. This study looks to examine the impact that true crime media has, particularly in regards to gender, especially the influence it has had on women and transgender individuals. Students at Ohio University were recruited and asked to fill out a short survey regarding their demographic information as well as being asked to answer a selection of knowledge questions about crime statistics. The majority of the research examined is an open ended response question posed in which participants were asked to explain in their own words how they believe true crime media has impacted them. When looking at the open-ended responses given by participants, the data shows that different genders tend to view true crime for different reasons. Men have the tendency to view true crime more for entertainment, while women are slightly more likely to view true crime as a defense mechanism. On the other hand, transgender individuals were much more likely to report viewing true crime as a means of protection. This means that viewing true crime allows them to find patterns amongst perpetrators and prepare in case of victimization. Given the findings of this study, there may be a potential correlation between true crime media, gender, and fear of victimization. Further research could expand upon these results and take an even deeper look into the societal impact and implications the growing genre of true crime has and may continue to have.

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2022, Industrial Engineering

The main objectives of this dissertation are to investigate the effects of arrests and officers on the Great American Crime Decline, estimate short-term and long-term effects of arrests and policing officers on major crimes, and identify the causal directions between crime, arrests, and officers. Statistical and econometric models such as Fixed Effects Poisson Regression, Panel ARDL Estimation and Panel Granger Causality Testing methods are employed. To avoid spurious regression, tests for cross-section dependency, unit roots, slope-homogeneity and co-integration are conducted to identify the best modeling approaches for effect estimation and causality detection. Data from various sources such as U.S. Census Bureau, F.B.I, Vera Institute of Justice, ICPSR were collected and prepared. In order to carry out a fine-grained analysis, policing agencies are divided into different groups based on population. The dataset for GACD study consisted of 1778 policing agencies from 1990-1999. Arrests of violent, property, disorder, drug sale and possession offenses, and police officers were the predictors while incarceration served as the control variable. For causality study, data on 1553 policing agencies from 1974-2020 was gathered and violent and property arrests, and officers were the independent variables. Results of the GACD study reveal that across all agencies, drug possession and disorder arrests, and officers had deterrence effect on crime, mostly on property crime. Interestingly, officers had a significant deterrence effect on both violent and property crimes only in very large and large agencies. Also, property crimes started to decline at least 3 years earlier than violent crimes. It can be insightful to further examine this delay to understand if property crimes have any effect on violent crimes. From the second study it was observed that both short-term and long-term significant relationships exist between arrests and crime across all agencies. Granger te (open full item for complete abstract)

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

This dissertation explores a most recently uncovered criminogenic place network hypothesis, asserting that crime place networks exist, that these infrastructures facilitate criminal activity nearby, and that these networks can be disrupted to reduce shootings and other crimes. Data collected from the City of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio, are used to examine this hypothesis. Findings support the assertion that criminogenic place networks exist, that they do facilitate crime nearby, and that they can be disrupted. Evaluations of Cincinnati's Place Based Investigations of Violent Offender Territories (PIVOT), revealed declines in shootings, violent crime, and weapon related calls to police. Statistically significant changes in shootings were detected in four of five projects. Shooting reductions ranged from twelve percent to ninety-two percent in PIVOT sites, after implementation of the PIVOT crime place network disruption strategy.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Crime hot spots are the result of offenders repeatedly perceiving and exploiting criminal opportunity at the same location. Theory supports the notion that offenders interact with their proximal environment; in fact, some have suggested proximal offenders condition the criminogenic effects of some types of facilities. Empirical tests have failed to clearly integrate measures of offenders and criminal opportunity in explanations of crime concentrations. The current dissertation integrated measures of likely offenders, from information on formally incarcerated persons, and criminal opportunity to explain concentrations of robbery and theft from auto across street blocks in Cincinnati. In addition, it tests whether exposure to offenders conditioned the effects of criminogenic facilities. Overall, findings show exposure to likely offenders is important to account for in explanations of crime concentrations. Not only do the likely offender measures have significant main effects, but they interact with some criminogenic facilities to create higher crime counts, beyond the independent effects of likely offender and facility measures.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, English (Arts and Sciences)

The dissertation is comprised of two sections—a critical essay titled “Crime Fiction as Political Novel in Postcolonial and Transnational Literature” and a book manuscript titled Where the Devil Turns. In “Crime Fiction as Political Novel in Postcolonial and Transnational Literature” I argue that even though crime fiction is easily dismissed in academia due to its formulaic nature, its mass consumption and rapid response to change gives it the ability to seed new political ideas as well as highlight and expose existing issues within a society. The genre's appropriation by postcolonial and transnational writers to examine identity, hybridity, and the failings of the state, along with providing a sense of catharsis and justice in the wake of instability experienced by both the postcolonial and transnational subject, has given it credibility as a serious form of literature. Where the Devil Turns is a crime novel set in Cape Town, South Africa, during the imminent approach of Day Zero, the day the city runs out of water. The novel uses the vehicle of crime fiction and intersecting narrative threads to illuminate the failure of the state in delivering on its revolutionary goals. Alet Berg is an ex-police officer that works in the country's booming industry of private security. Her old partner, Johannes Mathebe, tracks her down after years of no contact to help him look for his thirteen-year-old daughter who has gone missing. A second narrative thread follows a young homeless boy, Fairchance, from 1994 until the present day on his journey of entanglement with violent crime. A third narrative mimics extracts from a work of non-fiction, written by the character Grace Bhuku, in which she writes about her interviews of and experiences with Adriaan Berg, Alet's father and apartheid-era assassin for the state. This narrative raises the question of whether redemption is possible for the perpetrators of apartheid, and whether there is a place in the New South Africa for those who (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science in Criminal Justice, Youngstown State University, 2017, Department of Criminal Justice and Consumer Sciences

The death penalty has been one of the most controversial issues facing the American public for many years. The purpose of this research was to determine the effectiveness of capital punishment in reducing the violent crime rate. The focus of this study was integrative as I reviewed previous research to see if its conclusions support my hypothesis. My hypothesis is that the death penalty is not effective in reducing the violent crime rate and secondly that states with a death penalty have just as high of crime rates as states without a death penalty. Most offenders are not thinking with a rational head at the time they commit their crimes. They are usually not pondering the consequences of jail time if/when they get caught. I gathered my evidence from a meta-analysis of other death penalty deterrence studies. I found that there are many studies proving that the death penalty does not deter violent crime and why it is failing in doing so. Some of the benefits of this study are to enlighten people to the fact that we as a nation must realize the failures of the death penalty and recognize that every other industrialized nation has discontinued the use of the death penalty. Thus, as the embodiment of the free world we must stop killing offenders for nothing more than mere retribution.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Sociology

This dissertation explores the social, political, and economic factors that influence the severity of U.S. state-level crack/powder cocaine drug laws and prison admission rates over time. To the best of my knowledge, this empirical assessment of the determinants of changes in state-level drug law strength from 1977 to 2010 is the first of its kind. Furthermore, a review of the literature reveals that the subsequent use of such a wide-ranging drug law strength indicator to predict changes in state-level prison admission rates from 1978 to 2011 also is unparalleled. Estimates from two-way fixed-effects pooled cross-sectional models suggest that percent black, the presence of a Republican governor, real median household income (i.e., the tax base), and violent crime rates are positively associated with state drug law strength and prison admission rates. State drug law strength also is a positive predictor of state prison admission rates, but only for states in the South and ex-Confederate states. And contrary to claims often made in the literature, I find that the effects of state drug law strength on state prison admission rates are best characterized as unremarkable to moderate. This is especially the case when these effects are considered alongside those of other relevant explanatory variables.