Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and the Criminology of Place*

Abstract

A leading sociological theory of crime is the "routine activities" approach (Cohen and Felson, 1979). The premise of this ecological theory is that criminal events result from likely offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians against crime converging nonrandom4 in time and space. Yet prior research has been unable to employ spatial data, relying instead on individual-and household-level data, to test that basic premise. This analysis supports the premise with spatial data on 323,979 calls to police over all 115,000 addresses and intersections in Minneapolis over 1 year. Relatively few %ot spots" produce most calls to Police (50% of calls in 3 % ofplaces) and calls reportingpredatory crimes (all robberies at 2.2% of places, all rapes at 1.2% of places, and all auto thefs at 2.7% of places), because crime is both rare (only 3.6% of the city could have had a robbery with no repeat addresses) and concentrated, although the magnitude of concentration varies by offense type. These distributions all deviate signijicantly, and with ample magnitude, from the simple Poisson model of chance, which raises basic questions about the criminogenic nature of places, as distinct from neighborhoods or collectivities.Is crime distributed randomly in space? There is much evidence that it is not. Yet there are many who suggest that it is. In a leading treatise on police innovations, for example, Skolnick and Bayley (1986: 1) observe that "we feel trapped in an environment that is like a madhouse of unpredictable violence and Quixotic threat." People victimized by crime near their homes

More Places than Crimes: Implications for Evaluating the Law of Crime Concentration at Place

“…However, as we will demonstrate, the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient overestimate the level of crime concentration if there are fewer crimes than places, a situation that is common in studies that use street segments or census blocks as the spatial unit of analysis (e.g., Andresen and Malleson 2011), and very common in studies that use individual addresses (e.g., Sherman et al 1989). Because these micro-geographic units are small and crimes are relatively rare, crime data tend to be relatively sparse: the total number of crimes is usually smaller than the total number of micro-geographic units.…”

“…However, there appears to be no accepted standard for choosing particular reference values of either X or Y, other than a slight tendency to fixate the value of Y at round numbers (different values of X and Y are chosen by, for example, Braga et al 2010;Curman et al 2015;Sherman et al 1989;Weisburd 2015;Weisburd and Amram 2014). The lack of a common yardstick complicates comparisons between studies, and thus hampers testing the law of crime concentration.…”

“Soft” policing at hot spots—do police community support officers work? A randomized controlled trial

“…These small pieces of land-street segments, intersections, city blocks or unique addresses-account for much of the crime in any city described in published research to date. This phenomenon has led to the discovery of what is called a Blaw of concentration of crime in place^ (Weisburd 2015;Weisburd & Amram 2014;Weisburd et al 2010, p. 16), or what might be termed the criminal careers of places (Sherman 1993(Sherman , 2007; see also Sherman et al 1989).…”

“…An abundance of rigorous evidence converges on two lines of research. First, predictive and diagnostic approaches show that crime is disproportionately concentrated into a Bpower few^Bmicro^areas of land afflicted by a disproportional number of antisocial events (Pierce et al 1988;Sherman 1987;Sherman 1995;Sherman et al 1989;Weisburd 2015;Weisburd et al 2004). These small pieces of land-street segments, intersections, city blocks or unique addresses-account for much of the crime in any city described in published research to date.…”

Analyzing Local Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Police Calls-for-Service Using Bayesian Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation

“…Providing context for the interpretation of results is the routine activity theory, which hypothesizes that crime offenses result from the convergence of motivated offenders, suitable targets, and a lack of capable guardianship in time and space [62]. While the routine activity theory was originally proposed to explain crime offenses, it has been used extensively to analyze call-for-service data because it provides a theoretical lens to interpret spatio-temporal fluctuations in police data as a function of population-level movement patterns as well as small-area land-use characteristics [63]. It should be noted that the types and quantities of police resources required when responding to different classes of calls-for-service varies and that this is one limitation of analyzing aggregated call-for-service data.…”