INVESTIGATING CRIME-TO-TWITTER RELATIONSHIPS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS - FACILITATING A VIRTUAL NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

Social networks offer vast potential for marketing agencies, as members freely provide private information, for instance on their current situation, opinions, tastes, and feelings. The use of social networks to feed into crime platforms has been acknowledged to build a kind of a virtual neighborhood watch. Current attempts that tried to automatically connect news from social networks with crime platforms have concentrated on documentation of past events, but neglected the opportunity to use Twitter data as a decision support system to detect future crimes. In this work, we attempt to unleash the wisdom of crowds materialized in tweets from Twitter. This requires to look at Tweets that have been sent within a vicinity of each other. Based on the aggregated Tweets traffic we correlate them with crime types. Apparently, crimes such as disturbing the peace or homicide exhibit different Tweet patterns before the crime has been committed. We show that these tweet patterns can strengthen the explanation of criminal activity in urban areas. On top of that, we go beyond pure explanatory approaches and use predictive analytics to provide evidence that Twitter data can improve the prediction of crimes

Crowdsourcing geospatial data for Earth and human observations: a review

The transformation from authoritative to user-generated data landscapes has garnered considerable attention, notably with the proliferation of crowdsourced geospatial data. Facilitated by advancements in digital technology and high-speed communication, this paradigm shift has democratized data collection, obliterating traditional barriers between data producers and users. While previous literature has compartmentalized this subject into distinct platforms and application domains, this review offers a holistic examination of crowdsourced geospatial data. Employing a narrative review approach due to the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, we investigate both human and Earth observations through crowdsourced initiatives. This review categorizes the diverse applications of these data and rigorously examines specific platforms and paradigms pertinent to data collection. Furthermore, it addresses salient challenges, encompassing data quality, inherent biases, and ethical dimensions. We contend that this thorough analysis will serve as an invaluable scholarly resource, encapsulating the current state-of-the-art in crowdsourced geospatial data, and offering strategic directions for future interdisciplinary research and applications across various sectors

Crime and Fear in Public Places

No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place does. A public place, whatever its nature – a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner – is where people pass by, meet each other and at times become a victim of crime. With this book, we submit that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline. The book aims to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places with examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. This is achieved by tackling five crosscutting themes: the nature of the city’s environment as a backdrop for crime and fear; the dynamics of individuals’ daily routines and their transit safety; the safety perceptions experienced by those who are most in fear in public places; the metrics of crime and fear; and finally, examples of current practices in promoting safety. All these original articles contribute to our quest for safer, more inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Media’s influence on the 21st century society: A global criminological systematic review

This investigation assumes that the media can reduce or spread criminal activities and tendencies based on how the concerned parties apply the policies and community standards that guide these platforms’ use. In total, 254 materials were gathered across several search systems between October 2021 and September 2022. Qualitative data were used from the selected materials to synthesise and summarise the content on the examined 21st-century events and media’s influence on crime. It is not possible to reject the premise that the media influences opinions on crime and the legal system. Nevertheless, the data reveals that no causal media effect can be directly established. However, the same data uncovers how media portrays an activity affects how people perceive it. Advances in technology, media, and criminology may have affected the analysis of records, including the time and quality of resources. More accurate and fair media coverage of crime would lead to a more informed and aware population. On the other hand, media houses that promote and reward good behaviour should be applauded. These two steps ensure the media cannot be ignored when assessing crime and how the public perceives it, as it can encourage crime and shift perceptions. Therefore, further research, stricter laws and policies, and community education on crime prevention and media screening are needed. The fact that unfavourable media coverage of crime can ruin a business, either directly or indirectly (consumer behaviour changes due to crime), makes this paper of utmost importance for businessmen, politicians, and local agencies.Esta dissertação presume que os media podem ser utilizados para reduzir ou difundir atividades ou tendências criminosas, dependendo da aplicação de políticas e padrões comunitários que influenciam tais plataformas. Foram utilizados 254 materiais reunidos em diversos sistemas de pesquisa entre outubro de 2021 e setembro de 2022. Estes compreendem publicações do século XXI que examinam a influência dos media nas práticas criminais e suas perceções. Apesar deste estudo não possibilitar estabelecer uma relação causal, não é, ainda assim, possível rejeitar a premissa de que os media influenciam as perceções face ao crime. Determina, contudo, que o modo como os media divulgam uma atividade afeta a perceção social face à mesma. Uma população mais informada e consciente depende de uma cobertura mediática mais fatual. Os media que promovem e recompensam o bom comportamento devem ser louvados. Os media não podem ser ignorados na avaliação do crime e da sua perceção, tendo o poder de incentivar a criminalidade e potenciar alterações nas perceções sociais. Consequentemente, é necessário investigar mais, aplicar leis e políticas mais rigorosas, e investir em programas de educação comunitária de prevenção à criminalidade e interpretação dos media. Esta dissertação é de elevada importância a empresários, políticos e outros órgãos locais, pelo fato de a cobertura desfavorável do crime pelos media poder arruinar um indivíduo, organização ou até um negócio, seja de forma direta (críticas ao estabelecimento) ou indireta (mudanças no comportamento do consumidor devido à ocorrência de crimes numa região)

Place and Time in the Criminology of Place

This article evaluates developments in the ecological analysis of crime, which have found their most recent expression in a Criminology of Place. We argue that theoretical and methodological deficiencies are evident in the Criminology of Place and associated literatures with respect to their underlying treatment of place, time and causation. Big Data holds promise for helping address these shortfalls, but dangers also. The successful advance of the Criminology of Place requires elevating the why question to equal status with those of where and what in the analysis of crime. Ultimately, the paper positions the progress towards and prospects for a multi-scalar and time sensitive theoretical and empirical model of the Criminology of Place

Crime sensing with big data: the affordances and limitations of using open-source communications to estimate crime patterns

This paper critically examines the affordances and limitations of big data for the study of crime and disorder. We hypothesise that disorder-related posts on Twitter are associated with actual police crime rates. Our results provide evidence that naturally occurring social media data may provide an alternative information source on the crime problem. This paper adds to the emerging field of computational criminology and big data in four ways: i) it estimates the utility of social media data to explain variance in offline crime patterns; ii) it provides the first evidence of the estimation offline crime patterns using a measure of broken windows found in the textual content of social media communications; iii) it tests if the bias present in offline perceptions of disorder is present in online communications; and iv) it takes the results of experiments to critically engage with debates on big data and crime prediction

The Impact of Community Cohesion on Crime

Community cohesion generally acts to increase the safety of communities by increasing informal guardianship, and enhancing the work of formal crime prevention organisations. Understanding the dynamics of local social interactions is essential for community building. However, community cohesion is difficult to empirically quantify, because there are no obvious and direct indicators of community cohesion collected at population levels within official datasets. A potentially more promising alternative for estimating community cohesion is through the use of data from social media. Social media offers an opportunity for exploring networks of social interactions in a local community. This research will use social media data to explore the impact of community cohesion on crime. Sentiment analysis of tweets can help to uncover patterns of community mood in different areas. Modelling of community engagement on Facebook is useful for understanding patterns of social interactions and the strength of social networks in local communities. The central contribution of this thesis is the use of new metrics that estimate popularity, commitment and virality known as the PCV indicators for quantifying community cohesion on social media. These metrics, combined with diversity statistics constructed from “traditional” Census data, provide a better correlate of community cohesion and crime. To demonstrate the viability of this novel method for estimating the impact of community cohesion, a model of community engagement and burglary rates is constructed using Leeds community areas as an example. By examining the diversity of different community areas and strength of their social networks, from traditional and new data sources; it was found that stability and strong social media engagement in a local area are associated with lower burglary rates. The proposed new method can provide a better alternative for estimating community cohesion and its impact on crime. It is recommended that policy planning for resource allocation and community building needs to consider social structure and social networks in different communities

Could social medias reflect acquisitive crime patterns in London?

Embraced within the framework of crime opportunities integrated with Social Disorganization theory and Broken Windows theory, this paper intends to explore the patterns of four types of acquisitive crimes, using social media data i.e. Twitter, Foursquare and cross-sectional data acquired through text analysis technique. With Greater London as the study area, models like negative binominal regression (NBR) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) are performed to illustrate the aggregated relationships between acquisitive crimes and crime opportunities at London-wide and sub-regional MSOAs levels respectively. The results work towards to hypotheses that: the tweets sentiment could reflect property-related crime rates positively in light of Broken Windows Theory; more tweets with negative sentiment may incur increases of acquisitive crimes. It contributed to existing studies in (1) providing empirical evidence for integrating these three theories; (2) complementing current research on local discrepancies of acquisitive crimes by utilising both GWR and NBR models; (3) challenging the traditional stereotypes about racial disparities with the finding that ethnic heterogeneity and instrumental crimes have counterintuitive association, especially taking education factor into consideration; (4) implicating some localised acquisitive crime prevention strategies to policy makers in light of the reality that the relationship between local variations and different crime types may vary by place

Community-Oriented Policing and Technological Innovations

Community-Oriented Policing; Police Studies; Policing and Technology; Predictive Policing; Policing Innovations; Crime Prevention and Intervention; Crime Detection; Fear of Crime; Urban Securit