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Mapping Crime: Understanding Hot Spots

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About This Report

Much of crime mapping is devoted to detecting high-crime-density areas known as hot spots. Hot spot analysis helps police identify high-crime areas, types of crime being committed, and the best way to respond. This report discusses hot spot analysis techniques and software and identifies when to use each one. The visual display of a crime pattern on a map should be consistent with the type of hot spot and possible police action. For example, when hot spots are at specific addresses, a dot map is more appropriate than an area map, which would be too imprecise. In this report, chapters progress in sophistication. Chapter 1 is for novices to crime mapping. Chapter 2 is more advanced,...

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Non Familial Abductions

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Abstract

When a person is abducted and the suspect is someone other than a family member, it is a difficult for police to decide where to look for the victim. To date, there has been little research conducted on how offenders select murder and disposal sites, and how far they travel to get to these areas. Past research pertains only to the United States and United Kingdom. Thus, investigators have little knowledge regarding relevant distance relationships in Canada, and how offenders chose the locations to dump victims. This thesis includes a review of previous research in this field, as well as a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses. As stranger homicides are infrequent crimes, all Canadian and Washington State cases were included. Using data from Violent Crimes Linkage Analysis system (ViCLAS) and Homicide Investigative Tracking System (HITS), this research examined victim and offender demographics, temporal and spatial factors, the disposal site, and the distances involved in the crime. The distances analyzed were between the offender and victim's residence, point of initial contact, murder scene and disposal site. Many distinctive patterns emerged, relating to the age of the victim and offender,...

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Intimate Partner Kidnapping: An Exploratory Analysis

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ABSTRACT

The following study is an exploratory analysis of intimate partner kidnapping. The current study will give a descriptive picture of the victim, offender, and incident characteristics of a form of intimate partner violence that has never been studied before, intimate partner kidnapping, as well as a form of physical violence often seen in the literature, intimate partner assaults. The study will use a combination of the National Incident Based Report System (FBI, 2009), and the American Community Survey (Census, 2012) to identify these characteristics and also to identify any potential relationships between structural-level correlates and rates of intimate partner violence. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of multiple forms of intimate partner violence using police data, as well as, understand their relationships to structural-level correlates of counties.

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Travel-To-Crime: Homing In On The Victim

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ABSTRACT

Environmental criminology focuses on the intersection in time and place of the offender and victim. Patterns of crime are generally explained in terms of the routine activities of the offender. His or her travel to crime distances are short and crimes are committed within the offender's 'awareness space'. It has generally been theorised that victims also have short journeys to crime, associated with their routine behaviour. This review, however, suggests that occupancy of 'unawareness space', where people are away from familiar surroundings, may confer heightened risk. This is supported in research in the special case of crime and tourism, though other travelling victim patterns have been largely ignored. This paper postulates that crime risk increases at the intersection of offender awareness and victim unawareness spaces. The 2002–3 British Crime Survey provides some suggestive evidence on this. Its analysis reveals that 26.9% of self-reported victimisation occurs more than 15 minutes away from the victim's home. For personal

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The Medium is the Message: Firearm Caliber as a Determinant of Death from Assault

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Tims is the second report of a research project on violent assault in Chicago. The first, a study of fatal and nonfatal assaults with knives and guns, produced evidence to support three conclusions:

(1) Most homicide is not the result of a single-minded intention to kill at any cost.

(2) Many nonfatal attacks with knives and guns are apparently indistinguishable in motive, intent and dangerousness from many fatal attacks. Indeed, the overlap between fatal and nonfatal assaults with knives and guns is much more impressive than any differences that were noted.

(3) Weapon dangerousness, independent of any other factors, has a substantial impact on the death rate from attack.' This paper first reports on an attempt to carry the earlier research one step further by comparing low-caliber with high-caliber firearms attacks, and then suggests some ways in which the data developed in the two studies of fatal and nonfatal attacks might interest criminologists and criminal law scholars.

I. THE STUDY
A. Plan and Basic Data

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Runaway Juvenile Crime?: The Context of Juvenile Arrests in America

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Introduction and Analysis

On a Saturday night back in 1984, Kathy Robbins, a 15-year-old girl from Glenn County, California, was arrested for being in her town after curfew. She was taken in hand-cuffs to a 54-year-old cell in Glenn County’s adult jail. Four days after she was arrested, at a juvenile court hearing, a judge refused to release her to a juvenile detention facility. On that day, still isolated and alone in an adult jail cell, Kathy Robbins twisted a bed sheet around her neck, and hanged herself from the rail of the top bunk bed.

Robbins was one of six teenagers who took their lives in California jails between 1979 and 1984. The controversy surrounding her suicide culminated in the passage of a California law in 1987 which forbade the detention of teenagers in the same jails as adults. Juvenile advocates at the time regarded the California legislation as “the most progressive law in the U.S. on this issue.”3 With the help of this California law and the 1973

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When Words Alone Don’t Suffice: Employing a Systematic Approach in Measuring Offender Bias Motivation

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Abstract

The challenge of determining bias motivation in hate crime offenders was examined with the Bias Motivation Profile-Revised (BMP-R), a rating guide that measures behavioral, historical, and ideological indicators of suspect motivation to commit a hate crime. In review of 551 hate crime cases, the BMP-R rating criteria revealed adequate external validity in classifying hate crimes from non-hate motivated crimes and non-criminal “hate incidents”, as independently determined by crime investigators. The BMP-R criteria were related to offender pre-meditation, and revealed a significant predictive relationship to hate crimes involving violence to the person. Offender differences on the BMP-R were noted for gender and age, with modest race/ethnic differences being observed. These findings illustrate the importance of examining bias motivation in terms of an array of criteria, independent of the element of hate speech, in the assessment of hate crime offenders....

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Need Drugs, Will Travel?: The Distances To Crime Of Illegal Drug Buyers

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Abstract Available online xxxx Purpose: This study examines distances to crime among illegal drug buyers while controlling for buyer, drug, and destination characteristics.

Methods: Geocoded arrests for drug buyers in an urban municipality, over a three year period, spatially identify major drug markets. Negative binomial regression is used to model compositional characteristics of drug arrestees and contextual effects of markets on distance to arrest (n=4,082).

Results: Trip distance to drug purchase arrest varies by drug market. Being white, and having prior contact with the criminal justice system correlated with longer trip distances. Additional compositional effects vary by drug type.

Conclusions: In line with prior journey to crime research and crime pattern theory, illicit drug buyers are arrested in close proximity of their homes. Future research should consider the extent to which short aggregate market distances reflect policing differentials and close social ties...

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Effective  Responses:  High Crime  and  Disorder  Areas  

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Overview

There are a variety of ways to define high crime and disorder areas. For the purposes of this paper (as in the previous IACA Identifying High Crime Areas [2013] white paper), we will rely on three primary characteristics to define high crime and disorder areas. These include:

1. a relatively high volume of crime and disorder, 2. evidence of spatial clustering, and 3. an observable pattern of time occurrence and/or duration.

We recognize that this characterization of high crime and disorder areas shares many similarities with the definition of hot spots. Due to the large number of similarities between the two, in this paper high crime and disorder areas and hot spot areas will be treated as the same concept. Our goal is to help the reader identify these areas, understand contributing factors, develop interventions, and then evaluate their effectiveness in reducing crime and disorder. Police agencies and their communities...

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Crime in Rural Areas: A Review of the Literature for the Rural Evidence Research Centre

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1.1 Background

In August 1999, two men attempted to burgle a house in the village of Enmeth, Norfolk. The owner of the house, Tony Martin, had other ideas and upon entering, shot at the burglars, killing one of them. Martin was jailed for murder the following year (a sentence later reduce to manslaughter). A long-standing rural ideal is that the countryside is a crime-free place to live (Mingay, 1989). However, crime is by no means non-existent in rural areas. Nevertheless, until recently, the criminological literature has almost exclusively focused on cities and urban problems. The Martin case, received a great deal of media attention and prompted concern that rural crime problems were not being adequately addressed (Aust & Simmons, 2002; Jones, 2003; Mawby, 2004). In response, the 2000 Rural White Paper (DETR, 2000) placed crime in rural areas as a high priority area.

1.2 Research aims and objectives

This paper was a...

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The Age and Crime Relationship Social Variation, Social Explanations

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The relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime. They also reveal a long-term trend toward younger age-crime distributions in more modern times. Today, the peak age-crime involvement (the age group with the ...

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Witkin 6. [§ 291] Other Kinds of Simple Kidnaping and Related Offenses.

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(1) Other Kinds of Simple Kidnaping. Additional provisions of P.C. 207 cover one who does the following: (a) To commit an act defined in P.C. 288 (lewd acts with children under age 14, 2 Cal. Crim. Law (4th), Sex Offenses and Crimes Against Decency, § 41 et seq.), “hires, persuades, entices, decoys, or seduces” using false promises, misrepresentations, or similar means, a child under age 14 to leave the county or a part of the county, the state, or the country. (P.C. 207(b); see CALCRIM, No. 1200 [Kidnapping: For Child Molestation]; CALJIC, No. 9.51 [kidnaping for child molestation].) (b) By force or fear “takes or holds, detains, or arrests” a person, designing to remove the person from the state without having established a claim under federal or state law. (P.C. 207(c).) (c) From outside the state “abducts or takes by force or fraud” a person, against the law of the place where the act...

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Psychological and Behavioral Effects of Bias and Non-Bias Motivated Assault, Final Report

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ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to determine if measurable differences exist in the psychological and behavioral sequelae of individuals who have experienced an aggravated assault differentiated by the offender motive (i.e., bias or non-bias). Obtaining more reliable information in this area would support the development of more informed law and policy relative to the extra-detrimental effects a specific type of criminal offense may have on citizens. The research was based on police department criminal incident reports, probation records and victim surveys. Records were collected and analyzed for victims of aggravated assaults in Boston during the 1992- 1997 period. The sample of 560 bias-motivated assault victims and 544 non-bias assault victims yielded 136 valid surveys. Sixteen psychological and 12 behavioral indicators were examined while controlling for the effects of 7 independent aspects between the two victim groups (i.e., bias vs. non bias motivated, s/e factors, medical treatment, family support, quality of police

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Memory For Murder A Psychological Perspective On Dissociative Amnesia In Legal Contexts

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Mental health professionals and legal decision-makers often hear reports of memory impairment from both perpetrators of extreme violence such as homicide (e.g., Kopelman, 1995; Roesch & Golding, 1986; Schacter, 1986a), and from complainants and eyewitnesses (e.g., Loftus, 1993). Adult complainants, for example, have testified about their recovery of repressed memories for a violent incident(s) following a lengthy period of amnesia (e.g., Loftus, 1997; Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999). Although these two types of cases differ in the timing of the memory loss (current vs. historical), both require a consideration of the validity of dissociative amnesia. Dissociative amnesia refers to amnesia for a traumatic (and, in this context, criminal) experience which has a psychological origin. Whereas dissociative amnesia refers to a process of forgetting following a traumatic experience, a dissociative state refers to an altered state of consciousness occurring during a traumatic experience. Dissociation is the more general term referring to the separation..

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A Review of Weapon Choice in Violent and Sexual Crime

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Introduction

Weapon use in sexual and violent offences is a key consideration for police agencies and governments alike (Home Office, 2011). For the current paper, a weapon is defined as “an object used to cause or threaten injury to another”. Prevalence data pertaining to weapon enabled crime exists for England and Wales through Home Office statistical releases utilising both public survey and police statistics. For example, in the year ending March 2012, 51 per cent of attempted murders, 22 per cent of robberies, and one percent of rapes involved a knife or sharp instrument (ONS, 2012). Prevalence data is collected in many countries (Catalano, 2005; Home Office, 2011; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004) and is valuable for understanding trends, developing policies or preventative strategies and the like. However, it reveals little on the motivations or whether weapon type has the ability to differentiate between offenders. The question at hand is...

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TheDecision to Give Up Crime

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It is an understatement to say that the relationship between age and crime is fairly close. Let us recall three facts: First, the rate of arrests according to age starts a sharp decline at the end of adolescence. Second, among adult recidivists a reduction in criminal activity takes place with aging (Glueck and Glueck, 1937). Third, according to Blumstein and Cohen (1982:50), the total duration of the career of persons convicted for index crimes and who started crime at 18 years of age was 5.6 years. We must add, however, that this average hides important variations: There are offenders who start their adult career at 18 and end it in their forties. These findings would be inconceivable if desistance from crime were not a frequent occurrence. Offenders give up crime almost as often as they get into it. To die a criminal, one would almost have to die a violent death...

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