The built environment impacts on the patterns of crime in many different ways. The distribution and clustering of different land uses is thought, on theoretical grounds, to play an important role in where and when crimes occur. This study analysed the patterns of assault and motor vehicle theft in relation to the distribution of land uses across more than 60,000 separate parcels of land in a large British Columbia city. Specific land-use types that concentrate routine human activities in time and space are found to act as major crime generators and attractors. Attention to the distribution of these land-use types across the urban mosaic can substantially reduce the volume of crime associated with design decisions.
Patterns in crime vary quite substantially at different scales of aggregation, in part because data tend to be organized around standardized, artificially defined units of measurement such as the census tract, the city boundary, or larger administrative or political boundaries. The boundaries that separate units of data often obscure the detailed spatial patterns and muddy analysis. These aggregation units have an historic place in crime analysis, but increasing computational power now makes it possible to start with very small units of analysis and to build larger units based on theoretically defined parameters. This chapter argues for a crime analysis that begins with a small spatial unit, in this case individual parcels of land, and builds larger units that reflect natural neighborhoods. Data are limited in these small units at this point in time, but the value of starting with very small units is substantial. An algorithm based on analysis of land unit to unit similarity using fuzzy topology is presented. British Columbia (BC) data are utilized to demonstrate how crime patterns follow the fuzzy edges of certain neighborhoods, diffuse into permeable neighborhoods, and concentrate at selected high activity nodes and along some major streets. Crime patterns that concentrate on major streets, at major shopping centers and along the edges of neighborhoods would be obscured, at best, and perhaps missed altogether if analysis began with larger spatial units such as census tracts or politically defined neighborhood areas.
Recent research in the economics of policing has been concerned with what the police do and how much time they spend on those activities. Some of this research has highlighted that, based on the number of incidents, “crime” comprises only ∼ 20% of the police workload with much of the remaining 80% addressing public safety concerns. In this article, we deconstruct the nature of police incidents within a suburban city. We show that police expenditures, relative to the entire municipal budget, have been relatively constant over 30 years and that the volume of police activity has also remained relatively constant, although with a slight increasing trend. We show that the most of the decrease in crime can be attributed to population growth in this suburban city and that the places in which the police undertake different activities vary.
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