Steven's Peer Review #1

[stevenli-uoft]

Opening statement summary:

This paper analyzes the relationship between Toronto's police budget and crime rates from 2020 to 2023, finding that changes in the police budget had little impact on crime rates.

Strong positive points:

The paper effectively uses data visualization to present findings and draws interesting conclusions about the effectiveness of police budgeting.

Critical improvements needed:

1. The introduction could benefit from more context and literature review to better frame the research question and its significance.
2. The data section should include more detailed discussion of potential limitations and biases in the datasets used, particularly regarding crime reporting practices.
3. The analysis would be strengthened by including statistical tests or models to support the conclusions drawn about the relationship between police budget and crime rates.

Suggestions for improvement:

Please consider adding/changing/removing:

• Include more discussion of alternative explanations for the observed trends in crime rates beyond just police budget changes.
• Provide more specific policy recommendations or areas for future research based on the findings.
• Consider adding an appendix with the full datasets or additional analyses to support the main conclusions.

Estimated mark:

40/65

Reason:

The paper presents an interesting analysis of an important topic using appropriate data sources and visualization techniques. However, there are opportunities to strengthen the methodology, expand the literature review, and provide more nuanced interpretation of the results.

Component scores based on the rubric:

R citation: 1/1 LLM usage documented: 1/1 Title: 1/2 Author, date, and repo: 2/2 Abstract: 3/4 Introduction: 2/4 Data: 6/10 Measurement: 2/4 Prose: 4/6 Cross-references: 1/1 Captions: 1/2 Graphs/tables/etc: 3/4 Referencing: 3/4 Commits: 2/2 Sketches: 2/2 Simulation: 3/4 Tests: 2/4 Reproducibility: 0/4 Code style: 0/1 General excellence: 1/3

[YisuHou1]

Thank you for your feedback. I updated my literary review and an appendix with summary statistics of the full dataset. I also added a discussion of limitations. I chose not to discuss too much about policy recommendations and alternative explanations of trends, as they are not primary components of this project.