Michael Maltz
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Michael D. Maltz (born in Brooklyn, New York on December 18, 1938) is an emeritus professor at University of Illinois at Chicago in criminal justice, and adjunct professor and researcher at Ohio State University. In 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Maltz was the editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology from 1995 to 2000. In 1985 Maltz was awarded the prestgious Lanchester Prize by the Operations Research Society of America, recognizing his book "Recidivism" as that year's "best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English". The book also won the Leslie T. Wilkins Award (for the Outstanding Book in the Fields of Criminology and Criminal Justice) . He had a Fulbright Scholarship in 1996 at El Colegio de Michoacán in Mexico.
[edit] Research
Michael Maltz' research focuses on the application of operations research and data visualization to the field of criminology. 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
- Mapping Crime in Its Community Setting: Event Geography Analysis with Andrew C. Gordon and Warren Friedman (Note: 405 KB PDF)
- Recidivism (Note 2MB PDF) - awarded Lanchester Prize and Leslie T. Wilkins award for best book in criminology and criminal justice.
- "A Note on the Use of County-Level UCR Data" with Joseph Targonski (Note: 1 MB PDF)
- “Crime and Justice” (with Arnold Barnett and Jonathan Caulkins) in the Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science
- "Power to the People: Crime Mapping and Information Sharing in the Chicago Police Department" (with Marc Buslik)
- "Deviating from the Mean: The Declining Significance of Significance"
- "Bridging Gaps in Police Crime Data" published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics
- "Displaying Violent Crime Trends Using Estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey" (with Marianne Zawitz) published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics
