Criminology Editing and Proofreading Services

Recorded crime in the county rose eleven percent last year. That figure may mean more crime happened, or that more of it was reported, or that the department changed how it records incidents, or that a local campaign encouraged victims to come forward. For some offense categories all four are happening at the same time. A paper that treats a recorded figure as a measure of offending has not started its analysis yet.

The documents we edit for Criminology

Analyses built on recorded crime and survey data make up most of this work. Source description and limitation sections come with them. Evaluations of interventions and their designs arrive alongside. We also edit qualitative work with offenders, victims, and practitioners, sentencing and court data analysis, policy reporting for state and federal agencies, systematic and narrative reviews, ethics documentation for sensitive fieldwork, and dissertation chapters and grant applications. Our editors work on the data source and what it can honestly support.

What the editing involves

The treatment of the crime measure is what separates criminology from crime commentary, and the usual failure is a trend reported without its recording context. A figure drawn from police data records an institutional process at least as much as it records behavior. The source should be named, along with what it counts and the date its counting rules last changed, because recording standards and department practice both move, and every one of those movements looks like crime once plotted. A paper saying "these data have limitations" has hedged; a paper saying "the 2019 shift to incident-based reporting would inflate this series by roughly 8 percent" has made an argument.

Direction of bias matters more than the existence of bias. Victimization survey evidence used alongside police data separates reporting from offending in a way neither source manages alone, and the National Crime Victimization Survey exists for precisely that comparison. Offenses with known reporting dynamics deserve separate treatment, because the same percentage change means very different things for domestic violence, bicycle theft, and homicide.

The denominator needs stating as well. Whether the population underneath it is resident, daytime, or exposed changes what the rate describes, and a rate per 100,000 residents in a downtown precinct holding 9,000 residents and 80,000 daily workers describes almost nobody's actual risk. Comparisons across departments or countries should name the definitional differences before the numbers appear, because aggravated assault does not mean the same thing in two adjacent states. A paper is at its strongest when it states what would have to be true for its own trend to be an artifact.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including unpublished analyses, fieldwork material, and sensitive data. We are editors, not criminologists or statisticians, and we offer no opinion on crime trends, data quality, or policy. What we can do is make the limits of the source part of the argument.