Paul J. Brantingham

Nodes, paths and edges: Considerations on the complexity of crime and the physical environment

Crime has long been thought to be intimately associated with the physical environment in which it occurs. Theoretical and empirical developments over the past 20 years demonstrate that this relationship is complex and varies substantially at different levels of spatial and temporal resolution. Research on the distribution of property crimes in time and space resonates with research on the target selection processes of offenders to suggest that crime is strongly related to aggregate elements of the perceived physical environment: nodes, paths, edges and an environmental backcloth. The relationship between crime and the physical environment is mediated through individual awareness and action spaces. This implies a series of research issues and crime control policies for future exploration.

Mobility, Notoriety, and Crime: A Study in the Crime Patterns of Urban Nodal Points

Crime has long been known to be spatially patterned at many levels of aggregation. Contemporary explanations of this fact within urban areas assume that it is the result of interactions between the physical distribution of opportunities for crime, transportation flow patterns, and the awareness spaces of potential criminals. Data from a small city in Western Canada are used to conduct a simple test of the plausibility of this theoretical assumption for the crime of commercial burglary. The assumption is generally supported by the data.

Crime Seen Through a Cone of Resolution

The mapping of crime has been an important tool in the criminologist’s kit for a century and a half. Quetelet and Guerrey mapped French convictions beginning in 1825, and Mayhew mapped English convictions in the 1850s (Morris, 1958: 37-64). The core propositions of twentieth-century American criminology are drawn from (or represent reactions to) offender residence maps of Chicago and a number of other cities which were prepared by Shaw and McKay and their students and disciples from the late 1920s to the 1950s (Shaw, 1929; Shaw and McKay, 1931, 1969). Crime mapping remains an important method of organizing and using data (see, e.g., Voss and Petersen, 1971; Beasley and Antunes, 1974; Baldwin et al., 1976). The purpose of crime mapping has rarely been some sort of tactical analysis for law enforcement, but rather has usually been the broader aim of comparative social pattern analysis in search of the &dquo;causes&dquo; of crime. In such an analysis, crime maps

Crime Analysis at Multiple Scales of Aggregation: A Topological Approach

Patterns in crime vary quite substantially at different scales of aggregation, in part because data tend to be organized around standardized, artificially defined units of measurement such as the census tract, the city boundary, or larger administrative or political boundaries. The boundaries that separate units of data often obscure the detailed spatial patterns and muddy analysis. These aggregation units have an historic place in crime analysis, but increasing computational power now makes it possible to start with very small units of analysis and to build larger units based on theoretically defined parameters. This chapter argues for a crime analysis that begins with a small spatial unit, in this case individual parcels of land, and builds larger units that reflect natural neighborhoods. Data are limited in these small units at this point in time, but the value of starting with very small units is substantial. An algorithm based on analysis of land unit to unit similarity using fuzzy topology is presented. British Columbia (BC) data are utilized to demonstrate how crime patterns follow the fuzzy edges of certain neighborhoods, diffuse into permeable neighborhoods, and concentrate at selected high activity nodes and along some major streets. Crime patterns that concentrate on major streets, at major shopping centers and along the edges of neighborhoods would be obscured, at best, and perhaps missed altogether if analysis began with larger spatial units such as census tracts or politically defined neighborhood areas.

Burglar Mobility and Crime Prevention Planning

Burglary is a relatively frequent crime in North America with serious finan cial and personal/psychological consequences. The rate of reported burglar ies in the United States was 1,632.1 per 100,000 population in 1981. In Canada the rate was 1,518.2 per 100,000 population in the same year. About two-thirds of reported burglaries were residential break-ins in each country in 1981. Victimization surveys indicate that the incidence of resi dential burglary is even higher. The estimate provided in the United States National Crime Survey is 87.9 per 1,000 households in 1981.

A Topological Technique for Regionalization

This paper presents a mathematical technique for building perceptual models of urban areas. Concepts from point-set topology are used to develop a method of joining contiguous spatial units into relatively homogeneous clusters and to model how one homogeneous cluster blends or merges into the surrounding clusters. Both sharp and fuzzy borders between clusters are modeled. The technique is then used to model perceptual neighborhoods within a city and to explore how residential burglary rates vary between the interiors and borders of the neighborhoods.

Crime Seasonality Examining the Temporal Fluctuations of Property Crime in Cities With Varying Climates

This study investigates whether crime patterns fluctuate periodically throughout the year using data containing different property crime types in two Canadian cities with differing climates. Using police report data, a series of ordinary least squares (OLS; Vancouver, British Columbia) and negative binomial (Ottawa, Ontario) regressions were employed to examine the corresponding temporal patterns of property crime in Vancouver (2003-2013) and Ottawa (2006-2008). Moreover, both aggregate and disaggregate models were run to examine whether different weather and temporal variables had a distinctive impact on particular offences. Overall, results suggest that cities that experience greater variations in weather throughout the year have more distinct increases of property offences in the summer months and that different climate variables affect certain crime types, thus advocating for disaggregate analysis in the future.

Crime Specialization in Rural British Columbia, Canada

L’article avance l’argument qu’il faut compléter les taux de criminalité traditionnels par des quotients de l’emplacement des crimes (QEC) afin d’expliquer les tendances de criminalité au sein d’environnements ruraux. Bien qu’elle ait été ignorée auparavant, la surreprésentation de la violence rurale doit être évaluée afin de réduire la criminalité. Une étude se concentrant sur les infractions contre les biens et les crimes violents dans la province canadienne de la Colombie-Britannique démontre une différence marquée dans la distribution des types précis de criminalité, ce qui indiquerait la possibilité d’une différence urbaine-rurale en matière de causes de la criminalité. Cet article démontre que, en Colombie-Britannique, les zones rurales peuvent être considérées comme étant des zones qui se spécialisent dans les crimes violents.

Understanding Crime with Computational Topology

Environmental criminology began as a novel addition to criminology in the 1970s by calling for a shift in focus from offenders exclusively to the multidisciplinary exploration of criminal events. This involved the study and analysis of crimes, crime sequences, clusters of crimes, and the patterns yielded by them. This analysis always considered people (offenders, victims, and observers or guardians), locations where crimes occurred (convergence settings, crime niches, crime attractors, and more generally people attractors), and how people moved about between locations (home, daily activity nodes, and occasional trip end points). The mix of people, places, situations, attractions, and routines helps shape crime.

Computer Simulation in Criminal Justice Research

Public discussions about crime and the criminal justice system reflect a plurality of perspectives and concerns. These perspectives include various disciplinary views on the origins of criminality and patterns in criminal events; on the origin, implementation and impact of law, policy, and programmatic services aimed at reducing criminality and criminal events; and on crime and criminal justice issues as seen by victims, offenders and the public at large as well as by policy makers, practitioners and researchers. This complexity of reasons for conducting research is tied to our improved understanding of the complexity of the human environment in which crimes occur and it poses a challenge for criminal justice researchers. All criminological research is oriented toward exploring patterns and possibilities, toward developing explanations for any patterns found and toward developing tools and techniques for reduction of criminality and criminal events. Most research in criminology and criminal justice is structured in an attempt to replicate laboratory science by addressing simple issues within simple constraint sets while assuming other things have been controlled. We have concluded that there is a strong need for criminological research that addresses complexity instead of attempting to control for it.