Testing the “Law of Crime Concentration at Place” in a Suburban Setting: Implications for Research and Practice

Objective

To assess whether the “law of crime concentration at place” applies in a non-urban context. We test whether longitudinal trends in crime concentration, stability, and variability apply in a suburban setting.

Methods

We use group-based trajectory analysis to examine trends in recorded crime incidents on street segments in Brooklyn Park, a suburban city outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, over a 15-year period from 2000 to 2014.

Results

Consistent with the law of crime concentration at place, crime in Brooklyn Park is highly concentrated at a small percentage of micro-places. Two percent of street segments produced 50 % of the crime over the study period and 0.4 % of segments produced 25 % of the crime. The patterns of concentration are highly stable over time. However, the concentration of crime is substantially higher and there is much less street-by-street variability in Brooklyn Park compared to urban areas.

Conclusions

We find strong support for the application of the law of crime concentration at place to a non-urban setting, suggesting that place-based policing approaches tested in cities can also be applied to suburbs. However, there are also important differences in the concentration and variability of crime hot spots in suburbs that require further examination. Our study is based on a single setting that may not be representative of other suburban and rural areas. Finally, the clustering of hot spots raises questions about the use of street segments to analyze crime at suburban micro-places.

     

TRAJECTORIES OF CRIME AT PLACES: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF STREET SEGMENTS IN THE CITY OF SEATTLE*

Studies of crime at micro places have generally relied on cross‐sectional data and reported the distributions of crime statistics over short periods of time. In this paper we use official crime data to examine the distribution of crime at street segments in Seattle, Washington, over a 14‐year period. We go beyond prior research in two ways. First, we view crime trends at places over a much longer period than other studies that have examined micro places. Second, we use group‐based trajectory analysis to uncover distinctive developmental trends in our data. Our findings support the view that micro places generally have stable concentrations of crime events over time. However, we also find that a relatively small proportion of places belong to groups with steeply rising or declining crime trajectories and that these places are primarily responsible for overall city trends in crime. These findings are particularly important given the more general decline in crime rates observed in Seattle and many other American cities in the 1990s. Our study suggests that the crime drop can be understood not as a general process that occurred across the city landscape but one that was generated in a relatively small group of micro places with strong declining crime trajectories over time.     

The Law of Crime Concentration: An Application and Recommendations for Future Research

Objective

We address four outstanding empirical questions related to the “law of crime concentration” (Weisburd in Criminology 53:133–157, 2015): (1) Is the spatial concentration of crime stable over time? (2) Do the same places consistently rank among those with the highest crime counts? (3) How much crime concentration would be observed if crimes were distributed randomly over place? (4) To what degree does the spatial concentration of crime depend on places that are crime free?

Methods

The data are annual counts of violent and property crimes in St. Louis between 2000 and 2014. Temporal stability in the spatial inequality of crime is measured by computing the fraction of crimes that occur in the 5% of street segments with the highest crime frequencies each year. The spatial mobility of crime is measured by computing the number of years each street segment appears in the top 5% of street segments. Poisson simulations are used to estimate the fraction of crimes that could appear in the top 5% of street segments on the basis of chance alone. The impact of crime-free locales on the spatial concentration of crime is evaluated by comparing results from analyses that include and exclude crime-free street segments from the crime distributions.

Results

The concentration of crime is highly unequal and stable over time. The specific street segments with the highest crime frequencies, however, change over time. Nontrivial fractions of street segments may appear among the 5% with the highest crime frequencies on the basis of chance. Spatial concentration of crime is reduced when crime-free street segments are excluded from the crime distributions.

Conclusions

The law of crime concentration is not a measurement artifact. Its substantive significance, however, should be assessed in future longitudinal research that replicates the current study across diverse social settings.

     

Hot Spots of Juvenile Crime: A Longitudinal Study of Arrest Incidents at Street Segments in Seattle,Washington

Recent studies have shown that crime is concentrated at micro level units of geography defined as hot spots. Despite this growing evidence of the concentration of crime at place, studies to date have dealt primarily with adult crime or have failed to distinguish between adult and juvenile offenses. In this paper, we identify crime incidents in which a juvenile was arrested at street segments in Seattle, Washington, over a 14-year period, to assess the extent to which officially recorded juvenile crime is concentrated at hot spots. Using group-based trajectory analysis, we also assess the stability and variability of crime at street segments over the period of the study. Our findings suggest that officially recorded juvenile crime is strongly concentrated. Indeed, just 86 street segments in Seattle include one-third of crime incidents in which a juvenile was arrested during the study period. While we do observe variability over time in trajectories identified in the study, we also find that high rate juvenile crime street segments remain relatively stable across the 14 years examined. Finally, confirming the importance of routine activity theory in understanding the concentration of juvenile crime in hot spots, we find a strong connection between high rate trajectory groups and places likely to be a part of juvenile activity spaces. Though place-based crime prevention has not been a major focus of delinquency prevention, our work suggests that it may be an area with great promise.     

CRIMINAL GROUP EMBEDDEDNESS AND THE ADVERSE EFFECTS OF ARRESTING A GANG'S LEADER: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY

Although law enforcement agencies arrest criminal group leaders to dismantle organized crime, few studies have assessed whether such interventions produce adverse effects. Through a mixed‐method comparative case study of the Latin Kings and 22 Boys street gangs in Chicago, this article examines the consequences of arresting a gang's leader. Using violent crime data, I show that a spike in violent crime took place in the first month after the arrest of the 22 Boys gang leader. In contrast, the arrest of the Latin Kings gang leader produced no change in violent crime. Using several qualitative data sources, I show that the arrest of the 22 Boys gang leader temporarily led to the gang's withdrawal from its territory, which spurred violent aggression from rival gangs in adjacent territories. In contrast, the Latin Kings gang continued its operations because the gang's prison leaders quickly appointed new leadership. The results suggest that criminal group embeddedness (or the social relations between criminal groups) can contribute to adverse effects in interventions targeting gang or other criminal group leaders.     

Examining the Relationship Between the Structural Characteristics of Place and Crime by Imputing Census Block Data in Street Segments: Is the Pain Worth the Gain?

Objective

The current study proposes unique methods for apportioning existing census data in blocks to street segments and examines the effects of structural characteristics of street segments on crime. Also, this study tests if the effects of structural characteristics of street segments are similar with or distinct from those of blocks.

Methods

This study compiled a unique dataset in which block-level structural characteristics are apportioned to street segments utilizing the 2010 U.S. Census data of the cities of Anaheim, Santa Ana, and Huntington Beach in Orange County, California. Negative binomial regression models predicting crime that include measures of social disorganization and criminal opportunities in street segments and blocks were estimated.

Results

The results show that whereas some of the coefficients tested at the street segment level are similar to those aggregated to blocks, a few were quite different (most notably, racial/ethnic heterogeneity). Additional analyses confirm that the imputation methods are generally valid compared to data actually collected at the street segment level.

Conclusions

The results from the street segment models suggest that the structural characteristics from social disorganization and criminal opportunities theories at street segments may operate as crucial settings for crime. Also the results indicate that structural characteristics have generally similar effects on crime in street segments and blocks, yet have some distinct effects at the street segment level that may not be observable when looking at the block level. Such differences underscore the necessity of serious consideration of the issues of level of aggregation and unit of analysis when examining the structural characteristics-crime nexus.

     

The Trajectories of Crime at Places: Understanding the Patterns of Disaggregated Crime Types

Objectives

Investigate the spatial concentrations and the stability of trajectories for disaggregated crime types on street segments and intersections in Vancouver, Canada.

Methods

A longitudinal analysis of 16 years of crime data using street segments and intersections as the units of analysis. We use the k-means non-parametric cluster analysis technique considering eight crime types: assault, burglary, robbery, theft, theft of vehicle, theft from vehicle, other, and total crime.

Results

The overall results for the individual crime types versus overall crime are similar: crime is highly concentrated regardless of crime type, most street segment and intersection trajectories are stable over time with the others decreasing, and most decreasing trajectories are in the same general areas. However, there are notable differences across crime types that need to be considered when attempting to understand spatial pattern changes and implement crime prevention initiatives.

Conclusions

The law of crime concentration at places holds in Vancouver, Canada for disaggregated crime types in the context of spatial concentrations and their stability over time. However, notable differences exist across crime types that should be accounted for when developing theory or policy.

     

Where the Action is in Crime? An Examination of Variability of Crime Across Different Spatial Units in The Hague, 2001–2009

Objectives

To identify how much of the variability of crime in a city can be attributed to micro (street segment), meso (neighborhood), and macro (district) levels of geography. We define the extent to which different levels of geography are important in understanding the crime problem within cities and how those relationships change over time.

Methods

Data are police recorded crime events for the period 2001–2009. More than 400,000 crime events are geocoded to about 15,000 street segments, nested within 114 neighborhoods, in turn nested within 44 districts. Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients are used to describe the crime concentration at the three spatial levels. Linear mixed models with random slopes of time are used to estimate the variance attributed to each level.

Results

About 58–69 % of the variability of crime can be attributed to street segments, with most of the remaining variability at the district level. Our findings suggest that micro geographic units are key to understanding the crime problem and that the neighborhood does not add significantly beyond what is learned at the micro and macro levels. While the total number of crime events declines over time, the importance of street segments increases over time.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that micro geographic units are key to understanding the variability of crime within cities—despite the fact that they have received little criminological focus so far. Moreover, our results raise a strong challenge to recent focus on such meso geographic units as census block groups.

     

Crime: The amount and disparity of sentencing – A comparison of corporate and occupational white collar criminals

Research carried out previously, aimed at examining differences in the length of the sentencing and type of offence, have typically compared white collar and street criminality. The main aim of the current study is to examine the differences in sentence length for white collar occupational and corporate offenders from street crime offenses and to identify which factors eventually could explain such differences. The crime amount was smaller in occupational convictions despite the fact that the average crime amount was significantly less in this group compared to the crime amount among corporate criminals. Socioeconomic status and company size were not found to be associated with the length of the sentence. We discuss whether the difference in length of the sentence could be explained by the fact that occupational crime is committed for the criminals' own purposes or enrichment, while this is often not the case among corporate criminals.     

The Concentration and Stability of Gun Violence at Micro Places in Boston, 1980–2008

Boston, like many other major U.S. cities, experienced an epidemic of gun violence during the late 1980s and early 1990s that was followed by a sudden large downturn in gun violence in the mid 1990s. The gun violence drop continued until the early part of the new millennium. Recent advances in criminological research suggest that there is significant clustering of crime in micro places, or “hot spots,” that generate a disproportionate amount of criminal events in a city. In this paper, we use growth curve regression models to uncover distinctive developmental trends in gun assault incidents at street segments and intersections in Boston over a 29-year period. We find that Boston gun violence is intensely concentrated at a small number of street segments and intersections rather than spread evenly across the urban landscape between 1980 and 2008. Gun violence trends at these high-activity micro places follow two general trajectories: stable concentrations of gun assaults incidents over time and volatile concentrations of gun assault incidents over time. Micro places with volatile trajectories represent less than 3% of street segments and intersections, generate more than half of all gun violence incidents, and seem to be the primary drivers of overall gun violence trends in Boston. Our findings suggest that the urban gun violence epidemic, and sudden downturn in urban gun violence in the late 1990s, may be best understood by examining highly volatile micro-level trends at a relatively small number of places in urban environments.     

“用人单位”的刑法意义探讨——以强迫职工劳动罪为视角

"用人单位"本是劳动法中的概念,但是,经过《刑法》第244条的进一步确认,又赋予其刑法意义。根据罪刑法定原则,"用人单位"可以构成强迫职工劳动罪的单位犯罪主体。对此,不论从刑法与其他部门法的关系,还是按单位犯罪的代罚制原则,以及根据适用刑法人人平等原则,乃至从司法解释的合法性上来看,劳动法中的"用人单位"概念在刑法上均可以得到合理、合法的解释。     

THE LAW OF CRIME CONCENTRATION AND THE CRIMINOLOGY OF PLACE*

According to Laub (2004), criminology has a developmental life course with specific turning points that allow for innovations in how we understand and respond to crime. I argue that criminology should take another turn in direction, focusing on microgeographic hot spots. By examining articles published in Criminology, I show that only marginal attention has been paid to this area of study to date—often termed the criminology of place. I illustrate the potential utility of a turning point by examining the law of crime concentration at place, which states that for a defined measure of crime at a specific microgeographic unit, the concentration of crime will fall within a narrow bandwidth of percentages for a defined cumulative proportion of crime. By providing the first cross‐city comparison of crime concentration using a common geographic unit, the same crime type, and examining a general crime measure, I find strong support for a law of crime concentration. I also show that crime concentration stays within a narrow bandwidth across time, despite strong volatility in crime incidents. By drawing from these findings, I identify several key research questions for future study. In conclusion, I argue that a focus on the criminology of place provides significant opportunity for young scholars and has great promise for advancing criminology as a science.     

To protect and collect: a nationwide study of profit-motivated police crime

This study is part of a larger research project on police crime in the United States. Police crimes are those criminal offenses committed by sworn law enforcement officers who have the general powers of arrest. Profit-motivated police crime involves officers who use their authority of position to engage in crime for personal gain. This study reports the findings on 1,591 cases where a law enforcement officer was arrested for one or more profit-motivated crimes during the seven-year period 2005–2011. The profit-motivated arrest cases involved 1,396 individual officers employed by 782 state, local, special, constable, and tribal law enforcement agencies located in 531 counties and independent cities in 47 states and the District of Columbia. Our data is the first systematic study of profit-motivated police crime. The study describes the nature of this form of police misconduct in terms of several dimensions, including the characteristics of police who perpetrate these crimes, where it occurs, the specific criminal charges, and the contexts within which profit-motivated police crime is punished through police agencies and the criminal courts.     

Quantifying the Exposure of Street Segments to Drinking Places Nearby

Objectives

Introduce and test the relative efficacy of two methods for modeling the impact of cumulative ‘exposure’ to drinking facilities on violent crime at street segments.

Methods

One method, simple count, sums the number of drinking places within a distance threshold. The other method, inverse distance weighted count, weights each drinking place within a threshold based on its distance from the street segment. Closer places are weighted higher than more distant places. Distance is measured as the street length from a street segment to a drinking place along the street network. Seven distance thresholds of 400, 800, 1,200, 1,600, 2,000, 2,400 and 2,800 feet are tested. A negative binomial regression model controlling for socio-economic characteristics, opportunity factors and spatial autocorrelation is used to evaluate which of the measure/threshold combinations produce a better fit as compared to a model with no exposure measures.

Results

Exposure measured as an inverse distance weighted count produces the best fitting model and is significantly related to violent crime at longer distances than simple count (from 400 to 2,800 feet). Exposure to drinking places using a simple count is significantly related to violent crime up to 2,000 feet. Both models indicate the influence of drinking places is highest at shorter distance thresholds.

Conclusions

Both researchers and practitioners can more precisely quantify the influence of drinking places in multivariate models of street segment level violent crime by incorporating proximity in the development of a cumulative exposure measure. The efficacy of using exposure measures to quantify the influence of other types of facilities on crime patterns across street segments should be explored.     

广东街面犯罪常见防治措施与创新思路分析

街面犯罪是广东刑事犯罪中最主要的类型。近年来，广东警方通过公开巡逻、便衣伏击、端窝断腿等多项措施，在防治街面犯罪方面取得了一定成绩，但发案态势依然居高不下。警方宜转变思路，从截断犯罪链条、取证社会化、进一步解放警力、成立对抗犯罪的公益法律援助中心等多方面着手，全面深入地防治街面犯罪。     

The Concentration and Stability of Drug Activity in Seattle,Washington Using Police and Emergency Medical Services Data

Objectives

Prior research demonstrates that crime is highly concentrated at place and that these concentrations are stable from year to year, highlighting the importance of place to crime control and prevention. A potential limitation is that most studies only use one data source to diagnose these patterns. The present study uses data from both police and emergency medical services (EMS) to explore the spatial concentration and stability of drug activity in Seattle, Washington from 2009 to 2014.

Methods

We use concentration graphs and group-based trajectory analysis to examine concentration and stability of calls related to drug activity in both data sources separately and combined. Additionally, we employ Andresen’s S-Index to determine the similarity of concentration within the SPD data, the EMS data and the combined data year to year as well as the degree of co-location between the SPD and EMS data during the study period.

Results

We find a high degree of concentration and group-based stability for both SPD and EMS drug calls across all street segments in Seattle. Conversely, we find only moderate local geographic stability of drug use across street segments as indicated by each of the data sources over the study period. Last, we find the spatial patterns in drug use as indicated by each data source are significantly different each year.

Conclusions

At the same time these findings provide support for the law of crime concentration, they also raise questions about local stability patterns. Additionally, they highlight the importance of expanding inquiries of crime and place research into new data sources. Our results serve to reinforce the importance of multiple data sets in quantifying, understanding, and responding to the drug problem in Seattle.

     

Assessing the Validity of the Law of Crime Concentration Across Different Temporal Scales

Objectives

The present study examined if Weisburd’s (Criminology 53(2):133–157, 2015) law of crime concentration held across different theoretically relevant temporal scales.

Methods

The cumulative percentages of Philadelphia, PA USA street blocks and intersections experiencing 25 and 50 % of street robberies by hour of the day, days of the week, and seasons of the year were compared to the bandwidth percentages established by Weisburd (2015). Different analyses were used to determine the stability of the micro-places’ street robbery levels within the three temporal scales.

Results

We found that the cumulative percentages of street blocks and intersections experiencing 25 and 50 % of street robberies at each of the three temporal scales closely matched the bandwidth percentages expected from Weisburd (2015) and some micro-places experienced street robberies across all temporal periods while others had more isolated temporal concentrations.

Conclusion

Weisburd’s (2015) law of crime concentration holds across different theoretically relevant temporal scales, and future criminology of place studies should not ignore temporal crime patterns. Further, it may be possible to refine hot spots policing approaches by incorporating spatial–temporal crime concentrations.

     

Affairs of the Heart: Hate Crime and the Politics of Crime Control

Various scholars have noted the priority given to law in the politics of hate violence; violence is the problem and law, more specifically the criminal law, the solution at the ‘heart’ of society. This article seeks to explore some of the gaps and silences in the existing literature and politics that mobilize these ideas and associations. It is the gap sand silences associated with demands for and expectations of criminal justice that will be the particular concern of this article. The demand for law is examined by way of David Garland's recent work on the culture of crime control. His work offers an analysis of the contemporary place of crime control in Anglo-American liberal democracies. A distinctive feature of his analysis is to be found in the way it maps an important paradox of contemporary crime control; its political centrality and an increasing recognition of its limitations. Garland's ‘criminology of the self’ and the ‘criminology of the other’ raise some important challenges for those who advocate resort to crime control. My particular concern is to consider the significance of Garland's work for a contemporary sexual politics that puts violence and criminal justice at the heart of that politics. Feminist, gay and lesbian scholarship first on criminal justice and second, on violence and law will be used to develop a critical dialogue with Garland's analysis and to reflect upon the challenges raised by his insights into contemporary crime control. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

CLOSE‐UPS AND THE SCALE OF ECOLOGY: LAND USES AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CRIME

Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research has suggested that even the meso‐area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative binomial regression models (N = 73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land‐use measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is important in ecological studies of crime.     

经济犯罪死刑立法的多维解析

经济犯罪的概念对破坏市场经济秩序罪具有评价功能,而后者对前者具有载体功能。这一命题使得经济犯罪死刑立法的分析更具明确性。经济犯罪死刑立法的本质问题是刑法的政治性过度侵蚀刑法的道德性。经济刑法过度政治化的约束条件主要有4个,即工具主义刑法观、民主性不足的立法程序、老一代政治家的政治情感、法典主义的立法技术。随着这4个因素的先后变化,预计经济犯罪的死刑立法将很快得到改观。