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Bethel Park students win nationwide competition to help police fight crime

By Dave Zuchowski for The Almanac writer@thealmanac.Net 3 min read
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The old saw that suggests “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” doesn’t seem to apply to some of the students at Bethel Park High School.

On their very first stab at the Police Data Challenge, sponsored by the American Statistical Association, they came away the winning team in the Best Use of External Data category.

Physics teacher, Lee Cristofano got the ball rolling when he found the posting of the competition on Facebook and thought it might be a good project to incorporate into the big data and data analytics class at the high school where he co-instructs with marketing teacher, Emily Smoller.

The elective class open to all juniors and seniors at the high school is only in its second year, although an after school project started several years previously served as a forerunner.

To get started, the class was divided into three teams of three to five students each, who had to pick one of three police departments – Seattle, Cincinnati or Baltimore – for their study.

“We knew they (Baltimore) had a lot of crime and wanted to see how to fix that,” said Alaina Cerro, one of the three-team group leaders along with Sean Conroy and Elise Bermudez.

The students began working on the project the beginning of October and worked every week day during the 42-minute class to finish their project by the Halloween deadline.

They began by analyzing data in a variety of categories: top 10 common crimes, the time when a crime is committed, time of year a crime is committed and frequency of specific crimes, such as disorderly conduct, traffic stops and automobile accidents.

They also plotted all of the 911 calls on a map to show what parts of town had the highest crime rate.

Eventually the class pulled the data researched by the three teams into one report with their conclusions and recommendations and submitted it to the competition.

“The most difficult part of the project was analyzing the data and finding out where and when the crimes took place,” Sean said. “To finish the report, we downloaded data from our computer, organized it on a spread sheet and made a graph and map of the crime locations.”

The school learned in an email that its report had won the competition in the Best Use of External Data category on Dec. 5. For their effort, all three team leaders will receive an Amazon gift card valued at $50, a T-shirt, membership in the American Statistical Association and bragging rights.

The best overall high school was located in San Jose, Calif.

“It’s no shame for our students to lose out to a high school located in the Silicon Valley,” district spokeswoman Vicki Flotta said. “We’re very proud of our students’ win.”

According to Smoller, Bethel Park students have participated in the Pittsburgh DataWorks Competition for the past five years.

“It’s similar to the American Statistical Association Competition in that the students find and analyze data, but different in that they choose their own subject,” she said.

When asked what he gained by participating in the competition, Sean said it gave him experience in making graphs, maps and other tools to use technology to come up with conclusions and recommendations.

With one win already in the hopper, Cristofano said he’s keeping his eye on looking for future competitions to enter.

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