That is because in many respects, today's precincts still correspond to lines drawn arbitrarily by city administrators before the turn of the 20th century (Conlon, 2004). Many of those lines have changed in the last century and numerous new precinct headquarters and station houses have been added while others have been eliminated or absorbed or consolidated by others. Still, individual analyses of random or geographically-distant precinct-specific crime statistics are substantially less meaningful without some component of such analysis that also considers larger areas of overlapping precincts. Given the scale of potential changes in as large and varied community as New York City, the inability of the third unit of analysis to account for larger patterns is a considerable weakness.

Alternative Units of Analysis for Future Study:

Possible alternative units of analysis for future study would include those capable of providing information of larger geographic and demographic areas instead of information about the entire New York City area; a more targeted review (such as by specific types of crime) of more precincts instead of a more detailed review of a much smaller number of precincts; and a centralized analysis of information from each individual precinct instead of reliance on independent self-analysis provided by each precinct.

More specifically, one alternative unit of analysis could...

Unlike the units of analysis used by the Rutgers study, the suggested alternative unit of analysis would not omit more than ninety percent of the corresponding information from the city's other precincts.
Another alternative unit of analysis would be a review of all the information and crime statistics provided by the city's seventy-six individual precincts at the central command level instead of relying on the analyses conducted at the precinct level. In addition to recognizing larger patterns than those capable of being revealed by the precinct-level analyses, a command-level analysis of the same raw data from information collected at the precinct level is less susceptible to manipulative analysis techniques instituted by precinct commanders for the purposes of representing their performance as favorably as possible at the expense of accuracy or contextual understanding.