Keith Harries

Social stress and trauma: Synthesis and spatial analysis

In the last decade violence has emerged as a public health issue, with concomitant interest in surveillance and prevention. This paper is an extension of earlier work seeking to expand the ecological analysis of violence across jurisdictional boundaries, sharpen the level of resolution of such analysis, and ultimately inform small area policy applications in terms of public health initiatives for violence reduction. The underlying model is drawn from stress theory and rests on a set of social indicators representing stress in the Baltimore area. In the earlier work, a set of 24 variables describing violence and socioeconomic conditions across some 1358 areas was factor analyzed and the resulting scores were mapped and interpreted. The present paper takes the analysis a step further in an attempt to identify groups of observations with common traits in order to assist public health professionals and other relevant decision-makers in the process of trauma surveillance, response, and prevention. Cluster analysis was used to combine most similar observations in terms of the three orthogonal factors, and the resulting cluster affiliations were mapped in geographic space. Although no spatial contiguity constraint was put on the clustering algorithm, many statistical clusters were also found to constitute geographic clusters. This implies that the process identified neighborhoods or parts of neighborhoods with shared traits in terms of the underlying set of stressors. Analysis of this type could be used by policy-makers to classify neighborhoods in terms of their needs for various services in addition to public health interventions, including policing, fire protection, building inspection, social work, and education.

Area-based policies for crime prevention

Abstract The new emphasis upon crime prevention which has appeared in recent years has led to realignments in policing policy in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Although by no means leading to the abandonment of the more traditional forms of policing, schemes such as Neighbourhood Watch and the wider concept of community policing involve far greater levels of interaction between the police and the public. Area-based policies have appeared in numerous forms and have proved convenient ways for crime control resources to be organized. Early experiments in policing practice have not produced clear answers on the effectiveness of various strategies and there are wider issues of crime identification and control to be considered. A number of schemes of different kinds, ranging from target-hardening projects which increase physical security in particular areas, to attempts to involve communities in more effective social control are reviewed, and it is argued that the established methodologies of urban geography have much to offer in the monitoring and evaluation of crime prevention schemes of this kind.

The last walk: a geography of execution in the United States, 1786–1985

Abstract Increases in violent crime have renewed interest in the broader application of capital punishment, a controversial issue owing in part to its uneven application, historically, in both time and space, and in terms of offender and offense characteristics. In the course of American history, nearly 15000 people have been executed under civil authority. Public attitudes toward execution have evolved over time, and capital punishment has tended to diminish in scope in concert with trends in developed countries toward its application in response to only the most serious crimes. Five issues are examined here: the attributes of persons executed and the historical geography of capital punishment, by eras; the relationship between race and execution: recent trends in the geography of capital punishment; the relationship between rates of homicide and rates of execution: and inter-state variation in the application of capital punishment.

Geography, homicide and execution: the U.S. experience, 1930–1987

Abstract Prior research on the geography of homicide in the U.S. has shown a considerable variation in population-specific rates at the state level, with emphasis historically on high rates in the South. Here, the logical corollary of homicide, execution, is examined in the context of a taxonomy of states originally developed to illustrate homicide rates. The data base describes 3961 executions, all those occurring in the U.S. between 1930 and mid-1987. The research question: Is the geography of execution a reflection of the geography of homicide? is evaluated at two levels, each within the framework of an a priori regionalization of homicide rates based on a comparable period: (1) analysis of the relationship between homicide rates and execution rates, regionally delimited; and (2) the construction of a graphic generalization of relationships between the homicide regionalization and execution attributes. Although recent literature on the geography of homicide has cast doubt on the existence of a cultural dimension underlying geographic variations in homicide rates, evidence from the literature describing discriminatory practices in capital sentencing, anecdotal evidence dealing with patterns and practices associated with execution in recent years, and regional differences in execution characteristics exposed in the course of this research, are suggestive of the existence of significant underlying cultural components in the practice of execution. This research tends to support the position casting doubt on both the equity and utility of capital punishment.

Book Review: Wang, F. (Ed.). (2005). Geographic Information Systems and Crime Analysis. Hershey, PA: Idea Group. (345 pp.,

A geographer at Northern Illinois University, Fahui Wang has assembled a diverse and informative set of papers dealing with the interface between GIS and crime analysis. The latter has seen explosive growth over the last decade or so, with analytical mapping coming to the fore in virtually all large police departments and many smaller ones—and not only in the United States but also in many other parts of the world. A mini-revolution has occurred within a macro one. If the advent of GIS was itself a paradigm shift with an impact comparable to that of the introduction of quantitative methods in geography in the 1960s, then the shift from desktop mapping—a basic cartographic representation of data—to a more analytical approach has yielded rich new insights with the promise of more to come. It is against this backdrop that Wang’s collection of essays emerges. It should be noted parenthetically that crime analysis means different things to different people. As understood here, it is primarily the analysis of crime in police departments in order to contribute to the missions of crime monitoring, prevention, and detection. Various academics, government agencies, and private entities contribute to this process through research, frequently in collaboration with police departments. The book is divided into six sections, and the first two chapters review the process of data sharing in the context of GIS, starting with consideration of the Milwaukee Community Mapping, Planning and Analysis for Safety Strategies (COMPASS) project. This section illustrates how the Internet has become a tool for the interactive dissemination of crime-related information, with numerous police departments now making data available to the public, although the level of detail available remains a bone of contention, ultimately begging the question of how much public information can actually be accessed by the public. In the COMPASS project, Milwaukee pushed the envelope by making both crime and property data available at the parcel level. But beyond making crime data accessible to the community, data sharing can move to a higher level by enabling community collaborations for problem solving and strategic thinking. Section 2 ostensibly examines data issues, and the first of the three chapters deals with geocoding problems. However, the other two chapters are less clearly connected to the theme and might have been more accurately labeled analytical issues. On the other hand, data issues is such a broad rubric that it might be taken to include almost anything. In short, one may have expected, or hoped for, a systematic review of data issues going beyond geocoding to problems such as confidentiality and the perennial problem of limitations in access to data that might reasonably be regarded as being in the public domain. By this measure, the section disappoints, although the chapters included are interesting if seen as “stand-alone.” Geographic profiling has bloomed as a theme within geographic crime analysis and has become somewhat contentious with debate over the effectiveness of the method and also over how to evaluate it. It is appropriate, then, that a book dealing with GIS and crime should have a section on this topic, and it is the subject of Section 3. The lead-off chapter is by Kim Rossmo (the leader in the field) and coauthors, providing an overview of the process. This is followed by the presentation of a methodology that could be used to develop a geographic profile based on a single incident. The third chapter is more anecdotal, dealing with serial homicide and with one particular such case. Although the theoretical and empirical issues embedded in geographic profiling cannot be adequately covered in three chapters, the material is sufficient to provide an overview and stimulate the reader to explore further. The premise underlying Section 4 (“Crime Monitoring and Tracking”) is that it is critical to public safety to be able to very rapidly detect changes in crime trends. Using traditional methods, police Social Science Computer Review Volume 25 Number 2 Summer 2007 283–284

69.95 paperback)

The role of environmental factors in incidents of violence has been relatively neglected in recent decades. Complementing recent research in social psychology and social geography, the present study tested two hypotheses: (1) general environmental conditions-day of the week, season of the y ear, and thermal stress-are significant predictors of the daily incidence of assaults on children, and (2) victim characteristics, sites of incidents, and types of assaults on children vary with levels of neighborhood socioeconomic status. Some 1614 incidents involving persons aged 18 and under were abstracted from a data base of 9994 aggravated assaults drawn from the files of the Dallas, Texas, Police Department, covering a 20-month period from March 1980, through October 1981. Analysis indicated that general environmental indicators are significantly related to daily frequencies of assaults on children. Further, neighborhood socioeconomic status was significantly associated with childrens race, sites of assaults on children, and types of assault. Overall, only 11% of the assaults studied were classified as “abuse.” The dominant modes of assault involved firearms (28%) and knives (23%). The analysis revealed how assaults on children varied quantitatively and qualitatively as a function of victim characteristics, temporal and spatial context, and thermal stress.