Alex Hirschfield

Mapping and Analysing Crime Data: Lessons from Research and Practice

1. Introduction Part I: Crime Mapping and Research 2. Methods for Automating the Geographical Analysis of Crime Incident Data 3. GIS and the Journey to Crime: An Analysis of Patterns in South Yorkshire 4. Crime, Repeat Victimisation and GIS Part II: Local Authority Applications 5. Combating Crime Through Partnership: Examples of Crime and Disorder Mapping Solutions in London, UK 6. A GIS-linked Database for Monitoring Repeat Domestic Burglary Part III: GIS in the Police and Emergency Services 7. Mapping Out Hazardous Space for Police Work 8. GIS for Spatial Analysis of Fire Incidence: Identification of Social, Economic and Environmental Risk Indicators Part IV: International Perspectives 9. Tools in the Spatial Analysis of Crime 10. The Evolution of Crime Mapping in the United States: From the Descriptive to the Analytic Part V: Practical Considerations: What Can We Expect of GIS? 11. What to do About it?: Lets turn off our minds and GIS 12. Decision Support in Crime Prevention: Data Analysis, Policy Evaluation and GIS Applications GIS in the police and Emergency Services International Perspectives Future Directions

Linking Burglary and Target Hardening at the Property Level: New Insights Into Victimization and Burglary Protection

This article draws on a recent study that examined the impact of target hardening on domestic burglary in the City of Liverpool, England, between July 2005 and December 2007. Individual property-level data, from a range of sources, were collated for each residential property in the City enabling details about burglaries (timing, location, modus operandi) to be linked to data on the nature, timing, and location of target-hardening activity. Properties were grouped according to the presence or absence of burglary and/or target hardening at each address and the sequence of events. Groups included properties burgled, target hardened, and not subsequently burgled; no prior burglary, target hardened, subsequent burglary; burgled, never target hardened, and other combinations.The results suggest that property-level data give a richer picture of the relationship between burglary and target hardening than is possible using aggregate data at an area level.

How Places Influence Crime: The Impact of Surrounding Areas on Neighbourhood Burglary Rates in a British City

Burglary prevalence within neighbourhoods is well understood but the risk from bordering areas is under-theorised and under-researched. If it were possible to fix a neighbourhood’s location but substitute its surrounding areas, one might expect to see some influence on its crime rate. However, by treating surrounding areas as independent observations, ecological studies assume that identical neighbourhoods with markedly different surroundings are equivalent. If not, knowing the impact of different peripheries would have significance for crime prevention, land use planning and other policy domains. This paper tests whether knowledge of the demographic make-up of surrounding areas can improve on the prediction of a neighbourhood’s burglary rate based solely on its internal socio-demographics. Results identify significant between-area effects with certain types of periphery exerting stronger influences than others. The advantages and drawbacks of the spatial error and predictor lag model used in the analysis are discussed and areas for further research defined.

Crime Pattern Analysis, Spatial Targeting and GIS: The Development of New Approaches for use in Evaluating Community Safety Initiatives

A Geographical Information System is a system of hardware, software and procedures designed to support the capture, management, manipulation, analysis, modelling and display of spatially referenced information. Such systems enable links to be established and relationships to be analysed between different phenomena by cross referencing data sets drawn from a range of sources (e.g., data on demography, infrastructure, land use, environmental quality, health, crime and disorder, social cohesion, etc).

Toward a dynamic framework for security evaluation of voice verification systems

Research results have shown that spoof attacks pose severe security threats to biometric verification systems. Nevertheless the literature lacks a comprehensive, flexible and dynamic framework for security analysis of biometric and especially voice based verification systems when spoof attacks are taken into picture. This paper aims at highlighting the vulnerabilities, classifying the threats and clarifying requirements for such a dynamic framework which transfers the vulnerability evaluation results into legacy knowledge in the security domain. The proposed design and architecture facilitates comparison of two systems as well as definition of the threats in an independent and isolated way.