Crime and the Economy, from William Weaver
I used to collect data of the number of muggings in NYC prior to the holidays in an attempt to forecast retail sales numbers. I no longer do that because I can at best get the data weekly, and it's not good for predicting stocks in the short term, and any announced number, I have more recently found, is a crap shoot statistically.
That said, this NYT article reminded me of that research, and I wonder if there is a connection between crime and the overall health of the economy, ceteris paribus, that can give us a real time glimpse at what's going on… I always thought this data could help with jobs numbers but only have data for one city doesn't really cut it.