The Justice Department in one of the twenty counties in the state of Texkansahomatucky. Recently, the state Justice Department published a short report releasing crime statistics that included a crime map and your county was flagged as a high crime county. Because the District Attorney in the county is up for re-election this year, he is concerned that this report will significantly hurt his election chances. He has asked you to both verify that the methodology used in the official report indeed indicates that your county is in fact a high crime county and to write a short report proposing a "better" methodology, where you are to interpret "better" to mean a methodology that takes your county off the list of high crime counties!
Instructions
Your first task is to attempt to replicate the results of the report you are given based only on the information contained within the report. As you recall, the report should include both "a verbal description of the metric used including at least your method of calculation and the high crime/low crime threshold" and the raw data used to create the metric. If the attached report you have in front of you did this, you should have no problem recreating the results (you will need to cut/paste the data from the appendix of the report given to you into excel). Should you be unable to replicate the results, if I determine that this was because the original report was not written well enough to be replicable then it will not affect your grade.
The second task is to create a NEW metric that a) remove Jay County from the list of "high crime" counties, and b) alters the "high crime"/"low crime" status of as few other counties as possible.
Finally, you should write a persuasive report summarizing your results. This should be relatively short (roughly 500 words of text) and should include the following information:

1. A verbal description of the new metric used including at least your method of calculation and the high crime/low crime threshold and so forth.

2. A justification of the methodology utilized. Specifically you will want to persuade the reader that the metric you created is BETTER than the one in the original report.

3. Again, this should include the map created from the new metric, a table of the new metric by county, and the data used. Following these appendices, attach your replication. I will look in the excel spreadsheet you submit to ensure that you arrived at the same numbers as the group you are replicating, so you only need a paragraph or so, stating either that you were able to replicate the results (and if so you can comment on how easy/difficult this task was based on the degree of documentation in the original report) or that you were unable to (and if so, comment on why you were not able to replicate the results).

1. The data in excel format. This document should be well labeled and include a) the metric from your replication, INCLUDING CALCULATIONS (if you do not include calculations I cannot tell if you just copied their numbers or actually arrived at them mathematically) b) the table from the original paper so that I can compare the numbers you calculate in your replication to those that the original report contained, and c) the new metric you created to remove your county from the high crime list.

2. An additional document, which only needs to be a paragraph or two, reflecting on the assignment as a whole. What have you learned about the visual display of data and reporting of statistics?