Michael Maltz

Michael D. Maltz (1938) is an American electrical engineer, criminologists and Emeritus Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago in criminal justice, and adjunct professor and researcher at Ohio State University.

[edit] Biography

Michael Maltz was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 18, 1938. In 1963, Maltz earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Maltz was professor at University of Illinois at Chicago in criminal justice, and adjunct professor and researcher at Ohio State University. He was also the editor of the "Journal of Quantitative Criminology" from 1995 to 2000.

In 1985 Maltz was awarded the prestgious Lanchester Prize^[1] by the Operations Research Society of America, recognizing his book Recidivism^[2] as that year's "best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English". This book also won the Leslie T. Wilkins Award for the Outstanding Book in the Fields of Criminology and Criminal Justice. In 1996 Maltz had a Fulbright Scholarship at El Colegio de Michoacán in Mexico.

[edit] Work

Michael Maltz' research focuses on the application of operations research and data visualization to the field of criminology.

[edit] Crime mapping

In addition to authoring books on recidivism and crime mapping, he has been a strong advocate of ensuring that inferences made from data are not attributable to biases in the data used, nor to the way they were collected, nor to the methods used to analyze them.

This interest has surfaced most publicly in his critique of John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime (see link to "A Note on the Use of County-Level UCR Data" below) based primarily on a detailed analysis of the validity of the Uniform Crime Reports data set that Lott used to draw his conclusions.

A particularly lucid explanation of the pitfalls of improper use of statistics in social science (and, in particular, criminology) is contained in his article "Deviating from the Mean: The Declining Significance of Significance".

[edit] Publications

Maltz has published numerous books and articles on techniques for making valid and useful inferences from data. Books, a selection:

• 1984. Recidivism. Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, Inc.
• 1991 Mapping Crime in Its Community Setting: Event Geography Analysis. With Andrew C. Gordon and Warren Friedman. New York : Springer-Verlag Inc.

Articles, a selection:

• 1994. "Deviating from the Mean: The Declining Significance of Significance". In: Journal of research in crime and delinquency, Vol. 31 No. 4, November 1994 434-463.
• 1996. "POWER TO THE PEOPLE: Crime Mapping and Information Sharing in the Chicago Police Department". Paper with Marc Buslik.
• 1999. "Bridging Gaps in Police Crime Data". Report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
• 1999. "Displaying Violent Crime Trends Using Estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey" With Marianne Zawitz. Published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
• 2000. "Crime and Justice". With Arnold Barnett and Jonathan Caulkins. In: Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science. Saul I. Gass and Carl M. Harris (Editor). Springer.
• 2002. "A Note on the Use of County-Level UCR Data". With Joseph Targonski. In: Journal of Quantitatiûe Criminology, Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2002.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Michael Maltz’s homepage at UIC.
• Criminal Justice Research Center at The Ohio State University.
• El Colegio de Michoacán
• Journal of Quantitative Criminology