Urban streets as micro contexts to commit violence

Security Journal, 2014

2016

Various conceptions of pattern from biology, computer science, and mathematics to environmen-tal design, psychology, and sociology give rise to the multiplicity of definitions, descriptions, appli-cations, scales, and common features of spatial patterns in urban environments. Considering the complex relations between spatiality and sociality in place theory, the study tends to explore a growing body of knowledge in conceptions of urban crime and pattern. Placing the investigations of urban crime in relation to sociality and spatiality, the paper advocates for departuring from spatiality that is the common ground between urban crime and pattern conceptions. Hence, dis-missing both deterministic and free-will approaches to environmental design and addressing the urban crime as a complex city problem, the study argues that adopting a kind of spatial knowledge and possibilistic approach is critical for both understanding and transforming the city in order to investigate the issue of urb...

Scientific Reports

Nowadays, 23% of the world population lives in multi-million cities. In these metropolises, criminal activity is much higher and violent than in either small cities or rural areas. thus, understanding what factors influence urban crime in big cities is a pressing need. Seminal studies analyse crime records through historical panel data or analysis of historical patterns combined with ecological factor and exploratory mapping. More recently, machine learning methods have provided informed crime prediction over time. However, previous studies have focused on a single city at a time, considering only a limited number of factors (such as socio-economical characteristics) and often at large in a single city. Hence, our understanding of the factors influencing crime across cultures and cities is very limited. Here we propose a Bayesian model to explore how violent and property crimes are related not only to socioeconomic factors but also to the built environmental (e.g. land use) and mobility characteristics of neighbourhoods. to that end, we analyse crime at small areas and integrate multiple open data sources with mobile phone traces to compare how the different factors correlate with crime in diverse cities, namely Boston, Bogotá, Los Angeles and Chicago. We find that the combined use of socioeconomic conditions, mobility information and physical characteristics of the neighbourhood effectively explain the emergence of crime, and improve the performance of the traditional approaches. However, we show that the socio-ecological factors of neighbourhoods relate to crime very differently from one city to another. Thus there is clearly no "one fits all" model. Criminology widely recognizes the importance of places 1,2 : crime occurs in small areas such as street segments, buildings or parks, and it is spatially stable over time 3,4. However, theoretical and empirical research showed that crime is also a consequence of socioeconomic contextual characteristics, usually referred to as the "neighbourhood effect" 5,6. In criminology, cooperation, as opposed to disorganization of neighbours, is indeed believed to create the mechanisms by which residents themselves achieve guardianship and public order 7 , solve common problems, and reduce violence 7-9. This mechanism also finds its roots in urban planning, where the relationship between specific aspects of urban architecture 10 and urban physical characteristics 11 are related to security. Places and neighbourhoods are not to be considered islands unto themselves, as they are embedded in a city-wide system of social interactions. On a daily basis, people's routine exposes residents to different conditions, possibilities 12 , and this routine may favour crime 13. Nevertheless, many empirical studies focus on just a subset of static factors at a time such as socioeconomic factors without considering the contextual built environment 8,9,14-17 , or ignoring mobility 15,16,18,19 , and often only drawing results in a single city (e.g. Chicago) 8,9,15,19-26. Studies on small areas and neighbourhoods roughly come from two streams of literature. The first stream focuses on the routine activity and crime pattern theories 13,27,28 at places. These studies suggest that crime occurs

Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2014

Various conceptions of pattern from biology, computer science, and mathematics to environmental design, psychology, and sociology give rise to the multiplicity of definitions, descriptions, applications, scales, and common features of spatial patterns in urban environments. Considering the complex relations between spatiality and sociality in place theory, the study tends to explore a growing body of knowledge in conceptions of urban crime and pattern. Placing the investigations of urban crime in relation to sociality and spatiality, the paper advocates for departuring from spatiality that is the common ground between urban crime and pattern conceptions. Hence, dismissing both deterministic and free-will approaches to environmental design and addressing the urban crime as a complex city problem, the study argues that adopting a kind of spatial knowledge and possibilistic approach is critical for both understanding and transforming the city in order to investigate the issue of urban crime in relation to spatial patterns.

Technological development in every aspect of human life has formed wider analytical approach to the crime. The genesis and structure of crime, its intensity, and dynamics are subjects of intense scientific research carried out by researchers in various fields of science. At the same time, the crowd-sourced open data-sets as social media and Internet data-sets can be a valuable source of knowledge about various behavior patterns, and social phenomena, including those of criminal nature. This paper aims to present some results of observations, simulations, and prediction of crimes and their correlations to the physical environmental factors like weather or distance to the point of interest. The results are based on qualitative and quantitative data obtained from existing open resources. The research may be useful to model forces and police means to prevent and combat crime effectively.

Crime Science, 2015

The routine activity approach and associated crime pattern theory emphasise how crime emerges from spatio-temporal routines. In order to understand this crime should be studied in both space and time. However, the bulk of research into crime patterns and related activities has investigated the spatial distributions of crime, neglecting the temporal dimension. Specifically, disaggregation of crime by place and by time, for example hour of day, day of week, month of year, season, or school day versus none school day, is extremely relevant to theory. Modern data make such spatio-temporal disaggregation increasingly feasible, as exemplified in this special issue. First, much larger data files allow disaggregation of crime data into temporal and spatial slices. Second, new forms of data are generated by modern technologies, allowing innovative and new forms of analyses. Crime pattern analyses and routine activity inquiries are now able to explore avenues not previously available. The unique collection of nine papers in this thematic issue specifically examine spatio-temporal patterns of crime to; demonstrate the value of this approach for advancing knowledge in the field; consider how this informs our theoretical understanding of the manifestations of crime in time and space; to consider the prevention implications of this; and to raise awareness of the need for further spatio-temporal research into crime events.

Critically examine the idea that neighbourhoods characterized by higher levels of 'social disorganization' are more prone to crime.

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research

People ebb and flow across the city. The spatial and temporal patterning of crime is, in part, reflective of this mobility, of the scale of the population present in any given setting at a particular time. It is also a function of capacity of this population to perform an active role as an offender, victim or guardian in any specific crime type, itself shaped by the time-variant activities undertaken in, and the qualities of, particular settings. To this end, this paper explores the intra-daily influence of activities and settings upon the weekday spatial and temporal patterning of violent crime in public spaces. This task is achieved through integrating a transient population dataset with travel survey, point-of-interest and recorded crime data in a study of Great Manchester (UK). The research deploys a negative binomial regression model controlling for spatial lag effects. It finds strong and independent, but time-variant, associations between leisure activities, leisure settings ...

2011

Criminology, 2004

Studies of crime at micro places have generally relied on crosssectional data and reported the distributions of crime statistics over short periods of time. In this paper we use official crime data to examine the distribution of crime at street segments in Seattle, Washington, over a I4-year period. W e go beyond prior research in two ways. First, we view crime trends at places over a much longer period than other studies that have examined micro places. Second, we use