Database training

Contact: Judith Bailey, 216-368-4442, jcb4@po.cwru.edu

Posted 10/14/97

CWRU violence database can aid crime-prevention efforts

CLEVELAND -- Police, government, and grassroots groups involved with crime and violence prevention have a new tool at their fingertips to assist them in designing more effective programs.

The Violence Information Network (VIN), a service of the Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, is a county-wide, computerized database of crime and violence records.

VIN is a new addition to CAN DO (Cleveland Area Network for Data and Organizing), the Poverty Center's county-wide data base of economic, social and demographic information that debuted in February 1995. The Poverty Center offers dial-in access to CAN DO/VIN and training on how to use it.

CAN DO data include vital statistics, census figures, housing, mortgage lending, and welfare rates. VIN's database includes Cleveland police records (1985-96); Juvenile Court records (1985-95); homicide data from the coroner's office and child abuse data from the Cuyahoga County Department of Human Services, (both 1991-94); and Cleveland 911 calls (1994-95). Except for the Cleveland police records and 911 reports, all the data is county wide.

VIN tracks incidents of violence and the circumstances associated with them, such as the location of the crime and the victim's and assailant's address (by census tract), age, and race.

Using a personal computer and modem, users can access CAN DO/VIN through the Cleveland Public Library system, through any CWRU library system, and via the Internet. Account numbers to access CAN DO/VIN are available free of charge. Users can track data by census tract, by neighborhood, for any municipality, or for the entire county.

Users can correlate VIN data with socio-economic data from CAN DO, notes MSASS Assistant Professor David B. Miller, who developed VIN with Neil Bania, associate director of the Poverty Center, under a $137,000 grant from the Gund Foundation.

"By connecting information from VIN with data from CAN DO, users can look at the incidence of violence and the social indicators to see if there are correlations," Miller explains. Analyses that correlate types of crime with poverty or unemployment rates within a neighborhood, for example, will help planners design prevention programs to meet that neighborhood's needs, Miller noted. VIN and CAN DO are also useful in writing grant proposals and in evaluating crime prevention programs, he added.

At the Poverty Center's hands-on training sessions, participants learn how to access and navigate the databases, how to extract data and transfer it to the user's PC, and how to use the data within a word processing system for printing or within a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Training sessions are set for October 24, November 14 and December 12 from 1-4 p.m. in the Harris Library at the Mandel School, 11235 Bellflower Road. The cost for training, a CAN DO User's Manual and Map Book is $40. The training, manual, and map book may also be purchased separately. For more information call the Poverty Center at (216) 368-6946.

-CWRU-