The importance of small units of aggregation: trajectories of crime at addresses in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1998–2012
We describe the temporal and spatial patterns of crime at unique addresses over a 15-year period, 1998-2012, in a medium-sized Midwestern city. Group-based trajectory analysis of police incidents recorded by the Cincinnati Police Department are combined with geographic analysis for the entirecity, w...
Authors: | ; |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2016
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In: |
Criminology, criminal justice, law & society
Year: 2016, Volume: 17, Issue: 1, Pages: 20-36 |
Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
Keywords: |
Summary: | We describe the temporal and spatial patterns of crime at unique addresses over a 15-year period, 1998-2012, in a medium-sized Midwestern city. Group-based trajectory analysis of police incidents recorded by the Cincinnati Police Department are combined with geographic analysis for the entirecity, while also highlighting individual address points in one high-crime neighborhood. We find that six trajectories adequately describe the city-wide data, with the low-stable crime trajectory comprising the majority of the places, while the high-stable crime trajectory is just 2.5% of addresses yet consistently has one-third of crime, which accounts for a disproportionate amount of crime. Similar to previous research at the street-block level, small differences in city-wide trends from 1998-2012 obscure large differences within trajectories. Places with very different trajectories of crime are very often located on the same street segment. Nearly allhigh-crime addresses exist among a cloud of low-crime places. This suggests that characteristics of individual addresses are of importance both to crime theory and crime prevention practice. |
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ISSN: | 2332-886X |