'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.
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".
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
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