Crime and Place

This is a review essay of Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri's Indigenous Criminology, the publication of which coincides with a series of scandals and mounting inquiries into Indigenous justice issues around the globe. The publication of this important and timely work warrants reflection on the place of Indigenous issues within Australian criminology and their importance for the development of global criminologies. In the face of rising Indigenous incarceration rates, criminologists must ask some unsettling questions: has criminology as a discipline failed Indigenous Peoples? And, if so, how can we do things differently? To what degree has criminology been complicit in the rising rates of Indigenous incarceration internationally? And what, if anything, does criminology have to offer the crises in criminal justice which have been the experience of Indigenous Peoples around the globe?

Research Question Can police substantially reduce targeted patrol time without increasing crime and disorder in crime hot spots already receiving high levels of patrol, at high-risk times, to find a more cost-effective 'sweet spot' level of patrol staffing for each hot spot? Data Merseyside Police measured police presence every 5 min via GPS location trackers from body-worn police radios for five pairs of matched geo-fenced hot spots of crime and disorder in a larger night-time economy area. Crime and incident data were also collected in each of the ten hot spots, over two nights on each of six consecutive weekends, with matched crime data from the same 12 nights 1 year earlier, and matching GPS data from two weekend nights before the 6-week experiment. Methods The research design was a Maryland-Scale Level 4 test in which a group of five pairs of hot spots was randomly divided into one member of each pair receiving substantially reduced patrol time compared to the standard level received by the other member of the pair. The five experimental hot spots received at least 12-15 min of police presence every hour. Higher levels of patrol were maintained or increased in the control group consisting of the other five hot spots. Patrol time in the 'reduced patrol' experimental group was tracked and supervised closely with weekly individual feedback to a uniformed team of one sergeant and three constables. Another 40 uniformed officers working the larger area (including the five control group hot spots) were tracked to ensure they stayed out of the experimental hot spots. Findings The experiment delivered 35% less police time in treatment hot spots than in patrol hot spots. Total incidents reported by citizens to police dropped for the five 'reduced-patrol' experimental hot spots but not for the five high-patrol control spots.

This paper provides a contextual understanding of police officers and civilian receptivity to research and evidence-based policing (EBP). It focuses on how officers defined and understand the concept of (EBP). The context driving these definitions (including political pressures, professionalisation and the rise of police-academic collaborations). The history of policing is littered with reform programmes, which aim to improve effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy. What does research mean to police officers in terms of 'hierarchies' and a 'ladder of evidence. It is argued that future studies of the police officer and civilian staff receptivity to research and EBP are crucial as receptivity influences the application of research and willingness to incorporate an evidence base into policing practice. Evidence-based policing (EBP) are popular and enduring reform effort, which has generated significant research and practitioner attention. In light of defunding the police movement, we must consider what police reform could and potentially should look like. Some, for example, have called for a reduced police footprint in marginalized communities through reallocating police funding toward preventative services for a myriad of social issues. However, drawing on Bayley's (1994) Police for the Future, we show that a dilemma arises concerning police involvement in these issues the police cannot be solely relied upon to address all social issues, but they cannot be fully absolved of the responsibility either. As such, further drawing on Bayley's (1994) thoughts for police reform, we instead argue for the adoption of evidence-based policing as a more fruitful driver of meaningful, long-term police reform as it not only enables the police to identify practices that are effective or even harmful but it also can be used as means for police accountability.

In late 2013, Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) conducted the first randomized experiment ever to test a hot spots patrol strategy (HSPS) across large areas, as distinct from testing extra patrols one hot spot at a time. The HSPS experiment required, and helped to refine, a formal theory of both the causes and effects of directed patrols in hot spots. This article presents an integrated theory of how to implement an HSPS in ways that maximize the preventive effects of patrol on crime. It then describes the HSPS experimental protocol used to test the theory in Trinidad. The key elements of HSPS are scaling up from specific hot spot locations to a district-wide focus on all its hot spots and feeding back to the constables who provide hot spots patrols data on what they have done and with what effect—presented every 2 weeks, at a district-level “COP-stat” meeting with the people actually doing the patrols.

Objective Research demonstrates that crime is concentrated. This finding is so consistent that David Weisburd refers to this as the “law of crime concentration at place”. However, most research on crime concentration has been conducted in the US or European cities and has used secondary data sources. In this study, we examine whether the law of crime concentration applies in the context of sub-Saharan Africa using primary data. Methods A crime victimization survey was used to collect data in the city of Kaduna (Nigeria). Using these data, the concentration of crime (breaking-and-entering and domestic theft) was examined at the household, street segment, and neighborhood levels. Specifically, variants of a Lorenz curve and the Gini index (GI) were used to examine whether crime concentrates at these different spatial scales and if such concentration reflects anything beyond the spatial distribution of opportunity for these types of offenses. Results Crime was found to concentrate at a...

Exploring long-term trends in crime and criminal justice is a multifaceted exercise. This article introduces the construction and methodological benefits of a series of new data sets that amalgamate approximately 30 years of public data on crime, victimization, fear of crime, social and political attitudes with national socioeconomic indicators in England and Wales. The data operate at both an aggregate and individual level and will be available for public use (and modification) from autumn 2015. Here, we outline the contours and contents of the data set and highlight the importance of using longitudinal data in exploring theoretical and empirical questions about crime, victimization and social attitudes.

This paper reports on a novel longitudinal study of local variation in the decline of recorded crime in Greater Glasgow, United Kingdom. We deploy group trajectory analysis (exploring spatial autocorrelation with Local Moran's I) and comparison of means to explore the underlying characteristics and trajectories of neighbourhoods over time. The research finds marked distinction in the level of crime and trajectories of different neighbourhood crime groups. Neighbourhood crime trajectories with high or low levels of crime exhibit spatial clustering and significant distinction in their characteristics. There is more limited spatial patterning, though still clear distinction between the characteristics of neighbourhood crime groups that exhibit different crime trajectories. We consider the research and policy implications of these findings.

Objectives This study examines the effectiveness of foot patrol in violent micro-places. A large urban police department deployed foot patrol in micro-places (hot spots) for a period of 90 days for two shifts each day. Our objective is to determine whether this activity impacted violent crime in these hot spots and whether spatial displacement of crime occurred. Methods Eight eligible foot beat locations were set by examining crime rates for previous years in order to identify micro-places of high criminal activity. We employed a quasi-experimental design comparing the four treatment to the four control areas, estimating panel-specific autoregressive models for 30 weeks prior to and 40 weeks after the treatment. Results Time series models revealed statistically significant reductions in violent crime in the micro-places receiving foot patrol treatment, while no such reductions were observed in the control areas. The deterrent effect, however, was short and dissipated

Hot spot policing involves the deployment of police patrols to places where high levels of crime have previously concentrated. The creation of patrol routes in these hot spots is mainly a manual process that involves using the results from an analysis of spatial patterns of crime to identify the areas and draw the routes that police officers are required to patrol. In this article we introduce a computational approach for automating the creation of hot spot policing patrol routes. The computational techniques we introduce created patrol routes that covered areas of higher levels of crime than an equivalent manual approach for creating hot spot policing patrol routes, and were more efficient in how they covered crime hot spots. Although the evidence on hot spot policing interventions shows they are effective in decreasing crime, the findings from the current research suggest that the impact of these interventions can potentially be greater when using the computational approaches that...

This study investigated the influence of experienced traumatic event(s) (High/Low) and place of residence (on campus/off campus) on level of fear of crime among university students. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design and gathered data from a randomly selected 281 University students. The sample comprises 184 (65.5%) males and 97 (34.5%) females. Hypotheses generated were tested using inferential statistics. The results showed that traumatic event(s) had significant relationship with fear of crime at (r= .394; <.01); however, further correlation coefficient reveals that traumatic event(s) accounted for about 39% variance in fear of crime. Results from this study revealed that students who reside off campus reported higher fear of crime than those who reside on campus [F (1, 277) = 202.06; <.05]; while also students with higher experienced traumatic event(s) reported higher fear of crime than those with low experienced traumatic event(s) [F (1, 277) = 40.16; <.05]. However, place of residence and traumatic event(s) were reported to have no interactive effect on fear of crime [F (1, 277) = 3.25; P>.05]. Therefore, it was concluded in this study that traumatic event(s) and place of residence are significant independent determinants of fear of crime among university students. School management should hence design strategies which will help in containing crime incidence in university setting, and also try to build more residential male and female hostels on university campus.