Spatial, Temporal and Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Maritime Piracy

Abstract

Objectives:To examine patterns in the timing and location of incidents of maritime piracy to see whether, like many urban crimes, attacks cluster in space and time.Methods:Data for all incidents of maritime piracy worldwide recorded by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency are analyzed using time-series models and methods originally developed to detect disease contagion.Results:At the macro level, analyses suggest that incidents of pirate attacks are concentrated in five subregions of the earth’s oceans and that the time series for these different subregions differ. At the micro level, analyses suggest that for the last 16 years (or more), pirate attacks appear to cluster in space and time suggesting that patterns are not static but are also not random.Conclusions:Much like other types of crime, pirate attacks cluster in space, and following an attack at one location the risk of others at the same location or nearby is temporarily elevated. The identification of such regularities has implications for the understanding of maritime piracy and for predicting the future locations of attacks.

The when and where of an emerging crime type: The example of metal theft from the railway network of Great Britain

“…The test requires aggregation of the study area into a grid. Following the procedure used by Marchione and Johnson (2013), Great Britain was divided into 10-km squares, those squares through which no railway lines passed were removed and the number of metal thefts falling within each grid square was counted. As for the NNI test, this procedure was repeated 10 times with crimes randomly positioned within each station Voronoi polyline.…”

Space–time interaction of residential burglaries in Wuhan, China

“…Johnson and Bowers (2004) find that residential burglary risk spills over to a 400-m radius area within two months following an initial burglary. The research base of the phenomenon has been broadened from property crimes to violent crimes (Marchione & Johnson, 2013;Ratcliffe & Rengert, 2008;Wells, Wu, & Ye, 2012). All these studies have identified similar spaceetime regularities of crime.…”

A unified model for context-based behavioural modelling and classification

“…Spatial and temporal patterns of pirate incidents have been modelled (Marchione and Johnson, 2013;Marchione et al, 2014). The role of contextual knowledge and information fusion in the context of maritime piracy has been discussed in (Rogova and Garcia, 2013).…”