Units of Analysis in Geographic Criminology

Putting Crime in its Place Putting Crime in its Place

Edited by David Weisburd Institute of Criminology Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and Department of Administration of Justice George Mason University, Manassas, VA USA Wim Bernasco Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) Leiden, The Netherlands and Gerben J.N. Bruinsma Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) Leiden, The Netherlands and Department of Criminology Leiden University, The Netherlands

123 Editors David Weisburd Wim Bernasco Institute of Criminology Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime Hebrew University, Jerusalem and Law Enforcement (NSCR) Israel Leiden, The Netherlands and [email protected] Department of Administration of Justice George Mason University Manassas, VA USA [email protected]

Gerben J.N. Bruinsma Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) Leiden, The Netherlands and Department of Criminology Leiden University The Netherlands [email protected]

ISBN 978-0-387-09687-2 (hardcover) e-ISBN 978-0-387-09688-9 ISBN 978-1-4419-0973-2 (softcover) DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-09688-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009931093

c Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identiﬁed as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.

Printed on acid-free paper springer.com Preface

This book is about the unit of analysis in studies of crime and place. The quick expansion of this field demands a reflection on what the units of its analysis are and should be. Crime analysts working for the police or government are confronted routinely now with the dilemma of identifying what the unit of analysis should be when reporting on trends in crime or crime hot spots, or when mapping crime and drug problems in cities. Also, in the field of policing new developments can be observed in place-based policing instead of offender-based policing in which the choice of the level of aggregation plays a critical role. We hope that this volume will contribute to crime and place studies by making explicit the problems involved in choosing units of analysis in the criminology of place or in crime mapping. Although the chapters have been written by experts in the field, the book has not been written for experts only. Those who are involved in the practice of crime mapping and academic researchers studying the spatial distributions of crime and victimization can learn from the arguments and tools presented in this volume. The book is the result of a three-day workshop on the unit of analysis held in September 2006 at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) in Leiden, the Netherlands. At the workshop, all participants presented the first drafts of their papers and others commented on them in the following discussions. After rewriting, all the papers were subsequently reviewed (single-blind) by three other workshop participants and by us, the editors. Besides the authors of the volume, we would like to thank Lieven Pauwels of Ghent University, Belgium; Danielle Reynald, Margit Averdijk, and Henk Elffers of the NSCR for their time and efforts to review the papers. We owe George Tita and Robert Greenbaum credit for borrowing a variation on the subtitle of their paper as the main title of the whole volume. We also want to thank the NSCR for organizing and financing the workshop at Leiden, and the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research for additional funding. At the NSCR, Ariena van Poppel, Jorgen¬ de Gooijer, and Soemintra Jaghai helped to

v vi Preface organize the workshop smoothly and supplied support when necessary. Lastly, we are grateful to Welmoed Spahr of Springer who supported us from the beginning and managed the production process.

Israel and USA David Weisburd The Netherlands Wim Bernasco The Netherlands Gerben J.N. Bruinsma Contents

Part I Introduction

1 Units of Analysis in Geographic Criminology: Historical Development, Critical Issues, and Open Questions ...... 3 David Weisburd, Gerben J.N. Bruinsma, and Wim Bernasco

Part II What Is the Appropriate Level of Investigation of Crime at Place? Theoretical and Methodological Issues

2 Why Small Is Better: Advancing the Study of the Role of Behavioral Contexts in Crime Causation ...... 35 Dietrich Oberwittler and Per-Olof H. Wikstrom¬

3 Where the Action Is at Places: Examining Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Juvenile Crime at Places Using Trajectory Analysis and GIS...... 61 Elizabeth Groff, David Weisburd, and Nancy A. Morris

4 Crime Analysis at Multiple Scales of Aggregation: A Topological Approach ...... 87 Patricia L. Brantingham, Paul J. Brantingham, Mona Vajihollahi, and Kathryn Wuschke

5 Geographical Units of Analysis and the Analysis of Crime ...... 109 George F. Rengert and Brian Lockwood

6 Waves, Particles, and Crime ...... 123 Michael D. Maltz

vii viii Contents

Part III Empirical Examples of Crime Place Studies: What Can We Learn?

7 Crime, Neighborhoods, and Units of Analysis: Putting Space in Its Place ...... 145 George E. Tita and Robert T. Greenbaum

8 Predictive Mapping of Crime by ProMap: Accuracy, Units of Analysis, and the Environmental Backcloth ...... 171 Shane D. Johnson, Kate J. Bowers, Dan J. Birks, and Ken Pease

9 Urban Streets as Micro Contexts to Commit Violence ...... 199 Johan van Wilsem

10 Determining How Journeys-to-Crime Vary: Measuring Inter- and Intra-Offender Crime Trip Distributions ...... 217 William Smith, John W. Bond, and Michael Townsley

About the Authors ...... 237

Index ...... 245 Contributors

Wim Bernasco Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Leiden, The Netherlands, [email protected] Daniel J. Birks School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Grifﬁth University, Brisbane, Australia, d.birks@grifﬁth.edu.au John W. Bond Northamptonshire Police, and University of Leicester, United Kingdom, [email protected] Kate J. Bowers UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, London, United Kingdom, [email protected] Paul J. Brantingham Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, [email protected] Patricia L. Brantingham Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, [email protected] Gerben J.N. Bruinsma Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Leiden, and Department of Criminology, Leiden University, The Netherlands, [email protected] Robert T. Greenbaum John Glenn School of Public Affairs and Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA, [email protected] Elizabeth Groff Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA, [email protected]

ix x Contributors

Shane D. Johnson UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, London, United Kingdom, [email protected] Brian Lockwood Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA, [email protected] Michael D. Maltz Criminal Justice Research Center, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, and University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA, mdm@sociology.osu.edu Nancy A. Morris Crime, Delinquency and Corrections Center, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA, [email protected] Dietrich Oberwittler Department of Criminology, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany, and University of Freiburg, Germany, [email protected] Ken Pease UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, London, and University of Loughborough and Chester University, United Kingdom, [email protected] George F. Rengert Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA, [email protected] William Smith Thames Valley Police, United Kingdom, [email protected] George E. Tita Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California Ð Irvine, CA, USA, [email protected] Michael Townsley School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Grifﬁth University, Brisbane, Australia, m.townsley@grifﬁth.edu.au Mona Vajihollahi Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, [email protected] David Weisburd Institute of Criminology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, and Department of Administration of Justice, George Mason University, Manassas, VA, USA, [email protected] Contributors xi

Per-Olof H. Wikstrom¬ Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, [email protected] Johan van Wilsem Department of Criminology, Leiden University, The Netherlands, [email protected] Kathryn Wuschke Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, [email protected] Part I Introduction Chapter 1 Units of Analysis in Geographic Criminology: Historical Development, Critical Issues, and Open Questions

David Weisburd, Gerben J.N. Bruinsma, and Wim Bernasco

Abstract Social scientists have had a long and enduring interest in the geography of crime and the explanation of variation of crime at place. In this introductory chapter, we first describe the history of crime and place studies, showing that in the course of two centuries, scholars have increasingly focused their interest on smaller spatial units of analysis. In the 19th century, they typically studied large administrative districts such as regions and countries. The Chicago School focused on much smaller urban communities. More recently, interest has moved toward geographic units as small as street blocks or addresses. After this historical account, we address specific questions regarding how the unit of analysis should be chosen for crime and place studies. We address substantive theoretical, statistical, and practical problems that are raised in choosing appropriate levels of geography for research and practice. We discuss issues of theory and data and consider the factors that have inhibited the study of units of analysis of crime at place to date, mentioning the specific contributions to the unit of analysis problem that are made by the chapters that follow.

Introduction

Criminologists have had a long and enduring interest in the idea of place and its role in the production of crime (Weisburd and McEwen 1997). In 1829 Adriano Balbi and Andre-Michel Guerry compared education levels and crime across large French administrative areas (“departments”) and discovered not only that crime var- ied across them, but that places with higher levels of education also had higher levels of property crime (Balbi and Guerry 1829; Kenwitz 1987). This ﬁnding, though sur- prising at the time given popular assumptions about the role of poverty in crime and reﬂective of a new fascination with the ability of social scientists to bring insights

D. Weisburd Institute of Criminology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; Department of Administration of Justice, George Mason University, Manassas, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

D. Weisburd et al. (eds.), Putting Crime in its Place,3 DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-09688-9_1, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 4D.Weisburdetal. into the nature and causes of social problems, was reinforced in similar studies conducted during the period. For example, the Belgian astronomer and statistician Lambert Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) also observed the variability of crime across large administrative areas, noting that some of the poorest areas of France and the Low Countries had the lowest crime rates (see Beirne 1987). Quetelet concluded that poverty was not in itself the cause of crime, but rather that crime develops when the poor and disadvantaged “are surrounded by subjects of temptation and ﬁnd themselves irritated by the continual view of luxury and of an inequality of fortune” (1831/1984, p. 38). The interest of criminologists in geographic criminology did not end with these early contributions to the birth of a “positivist criminology” in Europe. Across the Atlantic Ocean, new and important insights about crime and place were to be brought in the early 20th century by criminologists associated with the University of Chicago (Burgess 1925/1967; Park 1925/1967; Thrasher 1927; Shaw 1929; Shaw and McKay 1942/1969). Led by Robert Park, these scholars looked to characteris- tics of the urban environment to explain the crime problem in American cities. They found that crime was strongly linked to social disorganization and poverty in urban settings. In turn, just as 19th-century studies of crime at place helped to spawn the science of criminology in Europe, study of crime and place in the Chicago School was to encourage the development of a strong empirical science of criminology in the United States. In recent years, interest in crime and place has reemerged, and scholars in this area are once again at the cutting edge of major theoretical and empirical advances in criminology. In this case, the focus is not on the large administrative areas that were studied by European scholars in the 19th century or the middle level focus on neighborhoods and communities that sparked many of the important insights of the Chicago School and that continue to be an important concern of criminologists (e.g., see Reiss and Tonry 1986; Sampson et al. 1997), but rather a new concern with micro units of place such as addresses or street segments or clusters of these micro units of geography (e.g., see Eck and Weisburd 1995; Taylor 1997; Sherman 1995; Weisburd and Green 1995). Findings that 50 percent of crime is found at three or four percent of the micro crime places in a city (e.g., Sherman et al. 1989; Weisburd et al. 2004) has generated not only scholarly interest in crime at place but also strong policy and practitioner interest in what has been termed “hot spots of crime” (see Sherman and Weisburd 1995; National Research Council 2004; Weisburd and Braga 2006; Weisburd and Eck 2004). While study of crime and place has thus had an enduring role in criminology and has often occupied an important position in advancing theoretical insights, there has to date been little sustained theoretical and methodological interest in understanding and deﬁning the units of analysis that should be used. Criminologists have long been interested in the variability of crime at place, but they have given little thought to the level of geography that should be used in exploring such relationships. “What is a place? Should we study place at the micro or macro level? Is the action of crime at the level of regions, communities or micro place hot spots?” These questions are critical if we are to develop a systematic understanding of the role of place in crime,