Crime Concentration and Hot Spot Dynamics in Latin America

Abstract

work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any noncommercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.http://www.iadb.org 2016 Abstract * Latin America and the Caribbean is the most violent region in the world, with an annual homicide rate of more than 20 per 100,000 population and with an increasing trend. Yet most evidence of crime concentration, geo-temporal patterns, and event dependence comes from cities in high-income countries. Understanding crime patterns in the region and how they compare to those in high-income countries is of first-order importance to formulate crime reduction policies. This paper is the first to analyze crime patterns of cities in five Latin American countries. Using micro-geographic units of analysis, the paper finds, first, that crime in Latin America is highly concentrated in a small proportion of blocks: 50 percent of crimes are concentrated in 3 to 7.5 percent of street segments, and 25 percent of crimes are concentrated in 0.5 to 2.9 percent of street segments. This validates Weisburd's "law of crime concentration at place" (Weisburd, 2105). These figures are fairly constant over time but sensitive to major police reforms. The second finding is that hot spots of crime are not always persistent. Crime is constantly prevalent in certain areas, but in other areas hot spots either appear or disappear, suggesting a possible rational adaptation from criminals to police actions that cause crime displacement in the medium run to other areas. F...

Restoring paradise in the Caribbean: combatting violence with numbers

“…More precisely, for eight urban and suburban cities, less than 5 percent of street segments generate more than 50 percent of crime in a given year (Weisburd 2015). Jaitman and Ajzenman (2016) validate this law with similar findings from nine Latin American cities:…”

Crime concentration at micro-places in Latin America

“…In each case, the geocoding hit rate was above the 85% minimum threshold for reliability suggested by Ratcliffe (2004). Results from five additional cities from two other studies (Jaitman and Ajzenman 2016;Mejía et al 2015) were included for further completeness.…”

The dispersion of crime concentration during a period of crime increase

“…In-so-doing we introduce a crime concentration dispersion measure to determine if hot spots have just become hotter, or if other areas are responsible for the crime increase. Our results suggest that hot spot policing, which has received little attention in Latin American cities (Jaitman and Ajzenman, 2016), could offer similar crime reduction benefits in cities such as Rio de Janeiro. We show that not only are robbery patterns highly concentrated, but that additionally, even during a period of significant crime increase, targeting these high crime concentration areas potentially provides the best opportunity for reducing crime levels.…”