The methods and measures of centrography and the spatial dynamics of rape

Technique known as centrography are presented in order to demonstrate their utility for describing and measuring the salient features of a spatial distribution and for facilitating temporal and comparative analyses in discerning trends and contrasting spatial distributions of crime. Centrographic techniques are applied to a 5-year data set of lone-assailant rapes classified by type of offender. The results indicate that different classes of offenders have relatively distinctive spatial distributions. Moreover, changes in the spatial distributions of offender classes, through time, are not uniform.