Measuring Crime Concentration Across Cities of Varying Sizes: Complications Based on the Spatial and Temporal Scale Employed

Hipp,; Kim, Y-A

doi:10.1007/s10940-016-9328-3

Cited by 49 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Such a law would not guarantee, for example, that the most crime ridden 5% of the places contain any specific percent of crime, except that these places would have a lot more than 5%. This is consistent with Hipp and Kim (2016) who reported that 5% of street segments across 42 cities in southern California account for crime at its range from 35 to 100%. Our findings that calls for services are more concentrated than crime incidents, and that property crime is more concentrated than violent crime (for prevalence) suggest that researchers should be careful about drawing conclusions from data aggregating diverse sets of crimes and places.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

How concentrated is crime at places? A systematic review from 1970 to 2015

et al. 2017

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Background: Despite the increasing awareness and interests about the importance of crime concentration at places, scholars have not comprehensively synthesized the body of evidence related to this thesis. We conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence that crime is concentrated among places. Methods:We identified 44 studies that empirically examined crime concentration at place and provided quantitative information sufficient for analysis. We organized data using visual binning and fitted logarithmic curves to the median values of the bins. We examine concentration in two conditions: when all places are studied (prevalence), and when only places with at least one crime are studied (frequency). Results:We find that crime is concentrated at a relatively few places in both conditions. We also compared concentration for calls for services to reported crime incidents. Calls for services appear more concentrated than crime at places. Because there are several ways place is defined, we compared different units of analysis. Crime is more concentrated at addresses than other units, including street segments. We compared crime concentration over time and found less concentration in 2000s compared to 1980s and 1990s. We also compared crime concentration between U.S. and non-U.S. countries and found more concentration in U.S. Finally, violent crime is more concentrated than property crime. Conclusions:Though we systematically reviewed a comprehensive list of studies, summarizing this literature is problematic. Not only should more systematic reviews be conducted as more research becomes available, but future inquiries should examine other ways of summarizing these studies that could challenge our findings.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

How concentrated is crime at places? A systematic review from 1970 to 2015

et al. 2017

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“…This has led to the formulation of a law of crime concentration, which states that "for a defined measure of crime at a specific microgeographic unit, the concentration of crime will fall within a narrow bandwidth of percentages for a defined cumulative proportion of crime" (Weisburd 2015: 133). This proposition has since been the focus of several studies, and although a number of methodological concerns have been raised, the general proposition appears to hold true (Bernasco & Steenbeek 2017;Eck et al 2017;Levin et al 2017;Oliveira et al 2017;Haberman et al 2017;Gill et al 2017;Hipp & Kim 2017;Hibdon et al 2017).…”

Section: Geographically Targeted Policingmentioning

confidence: 96%

Quantifying the Geographical (Un)reliabilityof Police Data

Gerell

2018

Nordisk politiforskning

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Place-based policing has attracted a substantial amount of attention, not least in relation to hot spot policing. Such policing efforts depend on geographical analysis of where crime takes place. However, while it is well known that police crime data suffer from many limitations, less is known about the extent to which the geographical reliability of these data constitutes a problem. The present study attempts to quantify the extent of this problem by exploiting the fact that in Sweden there is an alternative, and more reliable, source of geographical data for incidents of arson. The study compares the locations for car arson incidents as recorded by the police and the rescue services, respectively. The resulting quantification of differences shows that the median error for the police data is 83 meters. This presents a potential pitfall for geographical analysis, both for researchers using police data and for the police themselves in their operational and strategic analysis of crime.

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“…Also, some states have a small population which suffers chronic victimisation, meaning that they expect to suffer two or more crimes. These sorts of questions could also be answered using other data sources, for instance, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016), the Crime Survey for England and Wales (Office for National Statistics 2017) or perhaps by examining crime calls at addresses or street segments (Hipp and Kim 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A similar type of metric is often used when the number of crimes suffered by the most victimised people is reported (Pease and Ignatans 2016;Pease 1998), or the most criminal individuals (Wolfgang et al 1987) or families (Farrington et al 2001). This metric, however, has some severe issues, such as the lack of agreement on the percentage that gets reported (Fox and Tracy 1988); the metric might not be comparable between different cities (Hipp and Kim 2016); it might be the result of a certain degree of randomness (Levin et al 2016) and it does not work as an adequate metric when the data is extremely sparse. Consider, for example, the number of street segments of The Hague and the number of sexual offences registered by the police between 2007 and 2009 in that city (Bernasco and Steenbeek 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Distribution of Crime and Its Concentration

2017

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Objectives Generally speaking, crime is, fortunately, a rare event. As far as modelling is concerned, this sparsity of data means that traditional measures to quantify concentration are not appropriate when applied to crime suffered by a population. Our objective is to develop a new technique to measure the concentration of crime which takes into account its low frequency of occurrence and its high degree of concentration in such a way that this measure is comparable over time and over different populations.Methods This article derives an estimate of the distribution of crime suffered by a population based on a mixture model and then evaluates a new and standardised measurement of the concentration of the rates of suffering a crime based on that distribution. ResultsThe new measure is successfully applied to the incidence of robbery of a person in Mexico and is able to correctly quantify the concentration crime in such a way that is comparable between different regions and can be tracked over different time periods. ConclusionsThe risk of suffering a crime is not uniformly distributed across a population. There are certain groups which are statistically immune to suffering crime but there are also groups which suffer chronic victimisation. This measure improves our understanding of how patterns of crime can be quantified allowing us to determine if a Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10940-017-9354-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. prevention policy results in a crime reduction rather than target displacement. The method may have applications beyond crime science.

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Measuring Crime Concentration Across Cities of Varying Sizes: Complications Based on the Spatial and Temporal Scale Employed

Cited by 49 publications

References 19 publications

How concentrated is crime at places? A systematic review from 1970 to 2015

How concentrated is crime at places? A systematic review from 1970 to 2015

Quantifying the Geographical (Un)reliabilityof Police Data

Measuring the Distribution of Crime and Its Concentration

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