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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 3:55 am
Time: 3:55 am
Results for crime locations
2 results foundAuthor: Weisburd, David Title: The Importance of Place in Policing: Empirical Evidence and Policy Recommendations Summary: This monograph argues that the police can be more effective if they shift the primary concerns of policing from people to places. Such a shift is already underway in American policing where place has begun to be seen as an important focus of police crime prevention effort. But even in the U.S., people and not places remain the central concern of policing. Places in this context are specific locations within the larger social environments of communities and neighborhoods. They may be defined as buildings or addresses, block faces or street segments, or as clusters of addresses, block faces or street segments that have common crime problems. This report presents research which describes from both empirical and theoretical perspectives how the police can produce substantial crime prevention effects by directing their focus at small, well-defined locations with high levels of crime. The research findings presented in this report also strongly indicate that place-based policing of this kind can prevent crime using considerably less resources than more traditional policing methods. Details: Stockholm: Brottsforebyggande radet (Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention), 2010. 69p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 25, 2010 at: http://www.bra.se/extra/measurepoint/?module_instance=4&name=The_importance_of_place_in_policing.pdf&url=/dynamaster/file_archive/100609/d4dd5dc1d51f6c3442a975a5f37d9ef3/The%255fimportance%255fof%255fplace%255fin%255fpolicing.pdf Year: 2010 Country: United States URL: http://www.bra.se/extra/measurepoint/?module_instance=4&name=The_importance_of_place_in_policing.pdf&url=/dynamaster/file_archive/100609/d4dd5dc1d51f6c3442a975a5f37d9ef3/The%255fimportance%255fof%255fplace%255fin%255fpolicing Shelf Number: 119686 Keywords: Crime LocationsCrime PreventionDrug TraffickingMaritime Crime (Gulf of Guinea; Africa)Maritime SecurityOrganized CrimePiracyPolicingPublic SafetyPublic Spaces |
Author: Weisburd, David Title: Understanding Developmental Crime Trajectories at Places: Social Disorganization and Opportunity Perspectives at Micro Units of Geography Summary: Individuals and communities have traditionally been the focus of criminological research, but recently criminologists have begun to explore the importance of “micro” places (e.g. addresses, street segments, and clusters of street segments) in understanding and controlling crime. Recent research provides strong evidence that crime is strongly clustered at hot spots and that there are important developmental trends of crime at place, but little is known about the geographic distribution of these patterns or the specific correlates of crime at this micro level of geography. We report here on a large empirical study that sought to address these gaps in our knowledge of the “criminology of place.” Linking 16 years of official crime data on street segments (a street block between two intersections) in Seattle, Washington to a series of data sets examining social and physical characteristics of micro places over time, we examine not only the geography of developmental patterns of crime at place but also the specific factors that are related to different trajectories of crime. We use two key criminological perspectives, social disorganization theories and opportunity theories, to inform our identification of risk factors in our study and then contrast the impacts of these perspectives in the context of multivariate statistical models. Our first major research question concerns whether social disorganization and opportunity measures vary across micro units of geography, and whether they are clustered, like crime, into “hot spots.” Study variables reflecting social disorganization include property value, housing assistance, race, voting behavior, unsupervised teens, physical disorder, and urbanization. Measures representing opportunity theories include the location of public facilities, street lighting, public transportation, street networks, land use, and business sales. We find strong clustering of such traits into social disorganization and opportunity “hot spots,” as well as significant spatial heterogeneity. We use group-based trajectory modeling to identify eight broad developmental patterns across street segments in Seattle. Our findings in this regard follow an earlier NIJ study that identified distinct developmental trends (e.g. high increasing and high decreasing patterns) while noting the overall stability of crime trends for the majority of street segments in Seattle. We go beyond the prior study by carefully examining the geography of the developmental crime patterns observed. We find evidence of strong heterogeneity of trajectory patterns at street segments with, for example, the presence of chronic trajectory street segments throughout the city. There is also strong street to street variability in crime patterns, though there is some clustering of trajectory patterns in specific areas. Our findings suggest that area trends influence micro level trends (suggesting the relevance of community level theories of crime). Nonetheless, they also show that the bulk of variability at the micro place level is not explained by trends at larger geographic levels. In identifying risk factors related to developmental trajectories, we find confirmation of both social disorganization and opportunity theories. Overall, street segments evidencing higher social disorganization are also found to have higher levels of crime. For many social disorganization measures increasing trends of social disorganization over time were associated with increasing trajectory patterns of crime. Similarly, in the case of opportunity measures related to motivated offenders, suitable crime targets, and their accessibility, we find that greater opportunities for crime are found at street segments in higher rate trajectory patterns. Finally, we use multinomial logistic regression to simultaneously examine opportunity and social disorganization factors and their influence on trajectory patterns. The most important finding here is that both perspectives have considerable salience in understanding crime at place, and together they allow us to develop a very strong level of prediction of crime. Our work suggests it is time to consider an approach to the crime problem that begins not with the people who commit crime but with the micro places where crimes are committed. This is not the geographic units of communities or police beats that have generally been the focus of crime prevention, but it is a unit of analysis that is key to understanding crime and its development. Details: Final report to the U.S. National Institute of Justice, 2009. 379p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 5, 2011 at: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/236057.pdf Year: 2009 Country: United States URL: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/236057.pdf Shelf Number: 122991 Keywords: Crime AnalysisCrime Hot SpotsCrime LocationsCrime MappingGeographic StudiesHigh Crime Areas |