The Crime Problem

Overlapped Bayesian spatio-temporal models to detect crime spots and their possible risk factors based on the Opole Province, Poland, in the years 2015–2019

“…Moreover, they can be used in deeper cause and effect analyzes. However, as suggested by Grana and Windell ( 2007 ), scientific cooperation between the staff and professional statisticians and the use of modern computing techniques is necessary. Hence, it seems that such statistical operations should be carried out more routinely and not be the product of strong encouragement from one side or the other by the persons concerned.…”

Modelling underreported spatio-temporal crime events

“…The observation of crime events constitutes a primary input used by government agencies for designing citizens’ security strategies [ 1 , 2 ]. Different instruments aim to register these observations, including official crime record systems, citizen victimization surveys, and offender self-reports of crimes committed [ 2 ].…”

“…The observation of crime events constitutes a primary input used by government agencies for designing citizens’ security strategies [ 1 , 2 ]. Different instruments aim to register these observations, including official crime record systems, citizen victimization surveys, and offender self-reports of crimes committed [ 2 ]. Nevertheless, the underreporting biases, introduced by unequal crime reporting across social groups and geographical areas [ 3 – 6 ], underrecording tendencies of official entities [ 7 ], which commonly prioritize the registration of high-impact offenses, methodological limitations in the selection of victims/offenders representative samples in the case of surveys [ 8 , 9 ], or simply, the lack of observers to report crime occurrences [ 8 ] highly impacts the number and type of offenses known through these mechanisms.…”

“…The dark figure of crime has severe consequences: (1) it limits the deterrent capacity of the criminal justice system, (2) causes victims to become ineligible for public and private benefits, and (3) it affects insurance costs, among others [ 10 ]. In addition, in citizen security planning, which requires time-varying and trustable reports of crime incidences for resource allocation [ 2 , 11 , 12 ], heterogeneous dark crime figures in different geographic areas may also result in the misallocation of police resources, hampering short-time planning as demonstrated by [ 9 , 13 ]. These geographic variations result from complex victim underreporting dynamics and inconsistencies in recording practices across different jurisdictions [ 14 , 15 ].…”

“…In recent years, several governmental agencies established alternative mechanisms to observe crime-related phenomena, including telephone citizen’s reports [ 23 ], in-situ citizen’s field reports [ 24 ], and mobile-based reports [ 25 ], among others. Currently, these observational mechanisms are deeply integrated into the citizen’s security management information systems [ 2 ], registering large amounts of crime-related observations almost online, i.e., crime data is sequentially available during the operation of the information systems [ 26 ]. Although these observations still suffer from the dark figure of crime [ 8 ], together they may potentially provide valuable information for complementing official records.…”