Data for Good
Turning Data Into Impact
Empowering Students and Researchers to Build Safer Communities
Data alone doesn’t lead to safer communities, understanding how crime varies across places does. Data for Good supports students and researchers who want to explore how crime risk, geography, and social context shape real-world outcomes. By supporting independent crime analysis and spatial research, the initiative helps turn data into insights that inform more thoughtful, equitable approaches to public safety. This free program provides access to crime incident and risk data curated for academic research, while ensuring that client data remains confidential.
What is Data for Good?
This initiative reflects CAP Index’s academic roots. Founded at the University of Pennsylvania, the company has maintained deep ties to the academic community and now employs a team of Ph.D.-trained criminologists and sociologists to develop its models. By supporting independent research with this free program, we aim to advance rigorous, ethical approaches to understanding crime risk and its social impacts.
- This program connects CAP Index’s industry-leading crime risk data with university research projects that explore how data science, criminology, and geography can improve real world decision-making. The program is designed to support scholarly inquiry while ensuring responsible and ethical use of data.
- From crime risk forecasting to social impact analysis, students and faculty can apply to use CAP Index datasets for non-commercial academic research. Through these partnerships, CAP Index helps enable research that contributes to public knowledge, policy discussion, and data-driven approaches to community safety..
Who Can Participate?
- Undergraduate and graduate students conducting thesis or capstone research
- University labs focusing on public policy, criminology, or data science
- Faculty researching crime, social equity, and the geography of communities and places.
- Collaborative teams focusing on community outreach partnerships
All projects must align with CAP’s mission of ethical and responsible data use.
What We Offer
| Curated Datasets | Technical Guidance | Publication Support | Professional Networking |
|
US: Incident Data, Neighborhood Risk Scores, Gradient Heat Layers CAN, Puerto Rico, UK, Mexico: |
Consultation with CAP’s R&I team | Guidance on navigating academic and policy publication venues, along with relevant disclosure and attribution standards | Help building relationships with experts across criminology, data science, and applied public safety |
How to Participate
- Submit a brief proposal – Participants begin by submitting a short project description – no longer than one page – outlining their research question and how they plan to use CAP Index data. Proposals should focus on non-commercial, university-based research.
- Project review and discussion – Our team will review each submission and, if there’s a good fit, schedule a conversation to discuss the project in more detail. This helps ensure appropriate data use, clarify research goals, and explore how CAP can best support the work.
- Share your findings – Participants are asked to share high-level outcomes from their research so their insights can reach a broader audience. This may include:
- A short written brief or visual infographic featured on the Data for Good site, and/or
- A 3-5 minute lightning talk on CAP’s Geography of Crime podcast, focusing on the research question, the approach taken, key findings, and why the work matters for understanding crime.
