Spatial Heterogeneity in Crime Analysis
Issues related to the modifiable areal unit problem are well-understood within geography. Though these issues are acknowledged in the spatial crime analysis literature, there is little research that assesses their impact. In fact, much of the cited spatia
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Spatial Heterogeneity in Crime Analysis Martin A. Andresen and Nicolas Malleson
Abstract Issues related to the modifiable areal unit problem are well-understood within geography. Though these issues are acknowledged in the spatial crime analysis literature, there is little research that assesses their impact. In fact, much of the cited spatial crime analysis literature that investigates the impact of modified areal units suggests that there is no problem—there is, however, an alternative literature. In this paper, we employ a new area-based spatial point pattern test to investigate the impact of modified areal units on crime patterns. We are able to show that despite the appearance of similarity in a (spatial) regression context, smaller units of analysis do show a high degree of variation within the larger units they are nested. Though this result in and of itself is not new, we also quantify how much spatial heterogeneity is present. This quantification is undertaken using multiple crime classifications and in a cross-national comparison. Keywords Spatial crime analysis • Spatial heterogeneity • Modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) • Point pattern analysis
M.A. Andresen (*) School of Criminology, Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] N. Malleson School of Geography, Centre for Spatial Analysis and Policy, Centre for Computational Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK M. Leitner (ed.), Crime Modeling and Mapping Using Geospatial Technologies, Geotechnologies and the Environment 8, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4997-9_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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M.A. Andresen and N. Malleson
Introduction
Over the past 180 years, the geography of crime literature has moved to ever finer spatial scales of resolution. Beginning with the work of Quetelet (1831, 1842) and Guerry (1833), this literature has moved from French Departments, to counties, towns, neighborhoods and now the street segment (Glyde 1856; Burgess 1916; Shaw and McKay 1931, 1942; Sherman et al. 1989; Weisburd et al. 2004, 2009). The drive for analyses to be undertaken at these ever finer spatial scales is the discovery of significant heterogeneity within smaller spatial units of analysis: there are safe places within bad neighborhoods and dangerous places within good neighborhoods (Sherman et al. 1989). An obvious question to emerge within this geography of crime literature because of this finding is: what is the appropriate spatial scale of analysis? Indeed, those that advocate for smaller spatial units of analysis state that micro-places are now deemed appropriate whereas larger spatial units of analysis are not (Andresen and Malleson 2011). But how much does this issue really matter? Yes, there may be significant spatial heterogeneity, but does this impact the analysis?.1 A small branch of literature has investigated this question. The results most frequently cited show that the choice of the spatial unit of analysis is irrelevant (Land et al. 1990;
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