The Influence of Temporal Specification on the Identification of Crime Hot Spots for Program Evaluations: A Test of Long
- PDF / 819,985 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 10 Downloads / 156 Views
The Influence of Temporal Specification on the Identification of Crime Hot Spots for Program Evaluations: A Test of Longitudinal Stability in Crime Patterns Cory Schnell1 · Hannah D. McManus2 Accepted: 27 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Objectives Longitudinal studies from the criminology of place suggest crime hot spots are repeatedly found in the same locations within cities over extended periods of time. Program evaluations of hot spots policing interventions often use much shorter temporal windows to define hot spots. This study examines if stability of patterns is still found when using short and intermediate periods of time to measure crime hot spots. Methods We examined 765,235 total crime incidents reported to the Cincinnati Police Department from 1997 to 2016. These incidents were geocoded to 13,189 street segments. We created measures of crime hot spots based on varying temporal periods using three different strategies: pooled observations, group-based trajectory modeling, and k-means clustering. These measures were compared using techniques associated with survival analyses to determine the influence of temporal specification on the retrospective identification of crime hot spots. Results Our findings suggest regardless of the temporal specification, most street segments identified as crime hot spots remained crime hot spots across the observed follow-up periods. There was still much variability in patterns based upon temporal specifications and the use of additional years of incident report data did not uniformly provide an improved understanding of which street segments remained crime hot spots. Conclusions Program evaluations of hot spots policing strategies do not need to use extended periods of time to observe stability in crime hot spots. The criminology of place should provide more attention to the topic of temporal specification and continue exploring the utility of crime hot spots. Keywords Hot spots · Temporal patterns · Criminology of place · Program evaluation · Street segments
* Cory Schnell [email protected] 1
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina, 1305 Greene St, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
2
School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Quantitative Criminology
Introduction The concept of “crime hot spots” is essential to the criminology of place. Crime hot spots are a colloquial shorthand for the small number of micro-places (e.g. street segments, blocks, or addresses) which account for a disproportionately large amount of crime (Eck and Weisburd 1995). The criminology of place is an emerging area of research focused on further understanding the connection between micro-places and crime (Weisburd et al. 2012). The earliest research from the criminology of place argued that crime hot spots are an indispensable tool to summarize the distribution of crime within urban areas for the purposes of advancing both crimi
Data Loading...
