La concentration spatiale relative de la criminalité et son analyse : vers un renouvellement de la criminologie environnementale

This particular article describes and applies one type of analysis borrowed from regional economics and regional planning to look at macro to micro patterns in criminal activity. The technique is called Location Quotients and is used to analyse the relative mix of crimes across areas. Location Quotients are shown to have their strongest potential in microanalysis of crime patterns. As an initial test of the technique's relativistic analytic value. Location Quotients for motor vehicle theft were calculated for several levels within a Canadian cone of resolution that descends from the provincial level to the individual level in the municipality of Burnaby, British Columbia

Crime Emergence and Simulation Modeling: Modeling Crime Space

This chapter explores several new modeling approaches and research findings, showing how they may be used to explore and enhance theory. There is a special emphasis on Target Choice Selection, focusing on Crime Pattern Theory and the Geometry of Crime (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1978a, 1984, 1991; Brantingham and Brantingham, 1981, 1993a, 2008). This exploration is described through a series of research examples and a case study of the target choice behavior of high repeat offenders. The goal is to explore the emergence of patterns better understood against the urban backcloths for high repeat offenders. Emphasis is in this case study is particularly placed on the structural backcloth but will be expanded in future studies to include other backcloth components such as the social, the cultural, the economic, and the derived vernacular architecture that combine with structural components to form neighborhoods

How to Measure Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Equity Within the Complex Role of Police in a Democratic Society: An ICURS Economics of Policing Study

Policing is complex. No easy measures exist for determining efficiency, effectiveness or equity in the overall economics of police service. Perhaps this is related to the fact that the debate on issues like core policing and tiered policing is both contentious and not well understood. For example, dealing with mental health issues in vulnerable communities may not be considered core policing in some discussions but it certainly remains an important element of and a key activity in contemporary policing. We are, nevertheless, making major advances in the 21st Century. Simple crime rate or response time measures have some meaning, but the multi-agency, multi-role character of policing calls for better measures that take into account the underlying public meaning of crime, the varying demands for police service in different jurisdictions, and the rapid increase in cyber crime

Crime Generators and Crime Attractors: Updates to Research

Crime Attractor and Crime Generator research is advancing rapidly. Research explores the context of criminal events by looking at the awareness space of offenders and victims and location of targets and explores how mobility in an urban environment and the mosaic of the urban landscape influences safety, perceived safety, human agency and decision making. Research finds a heavy concentration of crime at major attractor nodes, primary pathways to these nodes and along sharp edges separating neighborhood

Power of Criminal Attractors: Modeling the Pull of Activity Nodes

The spatial distribution of crime has been a long-standing interest in the field of criminology. Research in this area has shown that activity nodes and travel paths are key components that help to define patterns of offending. Little research, however, has considered the influence of activity nodes on the spatial distribution of crimes in crime neutral areas - those where crimes are more haphazardly dispersed. Further, a review of the literature has revealed a lack of research in determining the relative strength of attraction that different types of activity nodes possess based on characteristics of criminal events in their immediate surrounds. In this paper we use offenders' home locations and the locations of their crimes to define directional and distance parameters. Using these parameters we apply mathematical structures to define rules by which different models may behave to investigate the influence of activity nodes on the spatial distribution of crimes in crime neutral areas. The findings suggest an increasing likelihood of crime as a function of geometric angle and distance from an offender's home location to the site of the criminal event. Implications of the results are discussed.Crime Attractor, Directionality of Crime, Mathematical Modeling, Computational Criminology

Towards understanding crime dynamics in a heterogeneous environment:A mathematical approach

Crime data provides information on the nature and location of the crime but, in general, does not include information on the number of criminals operating in a region. By contrast, many approaches to crime reduction necessarily involve working with criminals or individuals at risk of engaging in criminal activity and so the dynamics of the criminal population is important. With this in mind, we develop a mechanistic, mathematical model which combines the number of crimes and number of criminals to create a dynamical system. Analysis of the model highlights a threshold for criminal efficiency, below which criminal numbers will settle to an equilibrium level that can be exploited to reduce crime through prevention. This efficiency measure arises from the initiation of new criminals in response to observation of criminal activity; other initiation routes - via opportunism or peer pressure - do not exhibit such thresholds although they do impact on the level of criminal activity observed. We used data from Cape Town, South Africa, to obtain parameter estimates and predicted that the number of criminals in the region is tending towards an equilibrium point but in a heterogeneous manner - a drop in the number of criminals from low crime neighbourhoods is being offset by an increase from high crime neighbourhoods

Crime Pattern Visualization

An overview of crime pattern visualization for urban areas with a focus on crime pattern visualizations for Metro Vancouver.&nbsp

The Use of Virtual and Mixed Reality Environments for Urban Behavioural Studies

ABSTRACT Virtual/mixed reality 3D models of real-world environments can be used to run behavioural and other experiments with real human subjects, replacing the traditional approach where studies are conducted in physical environments. Use of the virtual/mixed reality environments can minimize problems related to feasibility, experimental control, ethics and cost, but care must be taken to ensure that the environments are immersive and create "suspension of disbelief". In this position paper the issues involved are discussed and illustrated by a 3D virtual model of an urban environment that is being used to study the role of fear in pedestrian navigation

A Crime Aggregation Model on Street Networks (CAMOSNet)

In this article, we develop a mathematical framework to model crime and crime concentrations on a city road network. The model proposed is an advancement to similar frameworks inspired by a model introduced by Short et al. (2008). A significant modification introduced in our model is the use of spectral graph theory to represent the road network and to simulate diffusion throughout the network. The techniques discussed are tested in a simulation model of crime applied to the city of Vancouver, BC, Canada. The simulations presented are based off of empirical data of crime in Vancouver along with its street network. Results of the simulations present crime patterns that are consistent with crime patterns observed in the city