Our research was concerned with the geographical areas of Kent and Medway and involved the spatial and temporal analysis of ‘heritage-specific offences’, ‘targeted heritage crime’ and ‘crime within, at or close to heritage sites’.
The crime data consisted of offence type and location details for the 1,122,180 crimes recorded by Kent Police during the period under study.
The geographical data we utilised included locations of Conservation Areas, Listed Buildings, Scheduled Monuments, Registered Parks and Gardens, Registered Battlefields, World Heritage Sites, Protected Wreck Sites and ‘Heritage at Risk’ sites in Kent and Medway.
Our best estimates suggest that currently approximately one in five Listed Buildings and one in four Places of Worship in Kent and Medway experience some form of crime each year. About one in ten Scheduled Monuments suffer crime, or it occurs nearby. Just over one half of Registered Parks or Gardens have one or more crimes a year within them. For Conservation Areas the proportion is (not unexpectedly) much larger, at closer to four in five.
We utilised local Moran’s I to identify spatial clusters at a regional level using LSOA-level crime data. This revealed several LSOAs on the fringes of areas of high levels of crime that could be particularly vulnerable to the spread of crime and therefore heritage-specific locations within these areas could be managed to halt the ‘spread’ of crime towards the periphery of the town.
In Kent and Medway Places of Worship (mostly Christian churches) are experiencing increasing numbers of crimes, and this has been particularly the case since around summer 2016. The rate of increase appears higher than that of all other crimes in the same period, both in general and at other heritage locations.
There is clear statistical evidence that metal thefts from churches have also been increasing markedly since around summer 2016. The rate of increase appears higher than that of most other crimes. There is statistically significant correlation between metal thefts from churches in Kent and Medway with both the price of lead and mixed brass.
Finally, we discovered that machine learning as a method of heritage crime prevention shows promise
