Tulsa World
Data showed that crimes at Tulsa elementary schools had increased 44 percent since 2005. And although crimes had decreased at Tulsa middle and high schools, the majority of violent crimes still occurred there.
The second part of the series would specifically look at school-reported child abuse.
From 2005 through 2008, Tulsa schools reported to police an average of 10.4 cases of possible child abuse each month, the World found. Police found about 75 percent of those calls—374 over the four years—credible enough to file an incident report, records show.
According to police, the majority of school-reported child abuse cases happened off campus. Teachers and counselors merely saw the effects, usually bruises on the child’s arms, neck or face, and notified police.
Because of the sensitive topic violence at schools and because of the amount of data we had, the World decided to create a special Web page for the series.
Besides simply posting the stories, a World Web designer placed the copy between larger photos, breakout boxes and an interactive map.
Using ESRI ArcView geographic information system software, I mapped each school and assigned different color dots for elementary, middle or high schools.
Then, the designer created an interactive feature in which users could scroll over a school to find out how many times school personnel called police and how many of those calls resulted in a police report.
We also uploaded a searchable database that let users search calls from each school. They could search by school, call description or year. The World uploaded a second database that specifically allowed users to search calls that resulted in a police incident report.
Given more time, the World could have produced any number of interesting stories using the calls from schools data.
A few ideas I would have liked to explore include matching the call data with school dropout data from the Oklahoma Department of Education. Do schools with the highest crime rates have the highest dropout rates?
It also would have been interesting to overlay a map of the schools with Census household income data. Are schools with the highest crime rates in areas with the lowest average household income?
A final idea would be to investigate how much time and money Tulsa police spend answering calls from schools. On average, Tulsa schools called police nearly seven times a week, data show.
Gavin Off is the data editor at the Tulsa World in Oklahoma and a former analyst for the IRE and NICAR Database Library.
