Spatio-temporal crime hotspots and the ambient population

• Published in: Crime science Vol. 4; no. 1; p. 1
• Main Authors: Malleson, Nick, Andresen, Martin A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 24.05.2015; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Big Data; Community and Environmental Psychology; Crime Patterns in Time and Space: The Dynamics of Crime Opportunities in Urban Areas; Criminal statistics; Criminology; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Law and Criminology; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Systems and Data Security; Twitter; Crime analysis and mapping; Big data; Population at risk; Clustering; SatScan
• ISSN: 2193-7680; 2193-7680
• DOI: 10.1186/s40163-015-0023-8

It is well known that, due to that inherent differences in their underlying causal mechanisms, different types of crime will have variable impacts on different groups of people. Furthermore, the locations of vulnerable groups of people are highly temporally dynamic. Hence an accurate estimate of the true population at risk in a given place and time is vital for reliable crime rate calculation and hotspot generation. However, the choice of denominator is fraught with difficulty because data describing popular movements, rather than simply residential location, are limited. This research will make use of new ‘crowd-sourced’ data in an attempt to create more accurate estimates of the population at risk for mobile crimes such as street robbery. Importantly, these data are both spatially and temporally referenced and can therefore be used to estimate crime rate significance in both space and time. Spatio-temporal cluster hunting techniques will be used to identify crime hotspots that are significant given the size of the ambient population in the area at the time.