Aoristic Signatures and the Spatio-Temporal Analysis of High Volume Crime Patterns

The spatial analysis of crime and the current focus on hotspots has pushed the area of crime mapping to the fore, especially in regard to high volume offenses such as vehicle theft and burglary. Hotspots also have a temporal component, yet police recorded crime databases rarely record the actual time of offense as this is seldom known. Police crime data tends, more often than not, to reflect the routine activities of the victims rather than the offense patterns of the offenders. This paper demonstrates a technique that uses police START and END crime times to generate a crime occurrence probability at any given time that can be mapped or visualized graphically. A study in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, demonstrates that crime hotspots with a geographical proximity can have distinctly different temporal patterns.