Geographic and Temporal Crime Patterns Across Six U.S. Cities

Keywords: crime, micro-places, hot spots
Session Type: Virtual Poster
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 4/9/2021 09:35 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/9/2021 10:50 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 52

Abstract

Existing research has established that crime is highly concentrated at a small proportion of micro-places, or hot spots, and changes in crime at relatively few micro-places can have considerable influence on citywide crime rates. Building on past research examining hot spot formation and change, this paper uses crime incident data for six large and varied U.S. cities (Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, San Antonio, New York City, and Philadelphia) to examine changes in the distribution of crime across blockfaces over an eleven-year period (2008-2018). We follow the approach used by Groff, Weisburd, and Yang (2010) which relies on a group-based trajectory analysis to identify blockfaces with different crime patterns. We then examine whether blockfaces with similar temporal trajectories are collocated spatially or whether there is variation in the temporal patterns of crime among nearby blockfaces. The results of the study inform how crime prevention strategies might be strategically implemented to target smaller units such as blockfaces rather than larger neighborhoods due to street-to-street variability.