SCIF Social Cohesion Indicators Flanders www.socialcohesion.eu Tuba Bircan Wim Hardyns Marc Hooghe A Spatial Analysis of Belgian National Crime Records, 2001-2005. Keywords: Crime Figures, Belgium, Spatial Analysis Paper presented at the Conference ‘New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics’ (NTTS) of the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), Brussels, European Commission, 18-20 February 2008. Tuba Bircan and Marc Hooghe are at the Department of Political Science of the Catholic University of Leuven; Wim Hardyns at the Departement of Criminology of the University of Ghent. This paper is part of the Social Cohesion in Flanders Project, 2007-2011. Corresponding author:
[email protected] Abstract In this paper, we investigate the occurrence of criminal acts at the community level in Belgium for the 2001-2005 period. Multivariate analysis shows that income levels do not have a significant effect on the occurrence of property crime, violent crime or homicide. Rather unemployment figures prove to be the strongest determinant of crime rates in general. Contrary to what has been shown by US research, we did not detect any patterns for homicide, an act that seems to be randomly spread across the territory. Introduction Explaining spatial diffusion patterns of crime is a continuing concern within criminology. Traditionally it has been argued that economic deprivation and inequality are positively correlated to the occurrence of criminal acts (Blau and Blau, 1982; Sampson, 1985). More specifically we want to investigate whether poverty, inequality or unemployment can be regarded as the strongest predictors for crime rates. Our hypothesis in this analysis is that inequality has a stronger effect on crime rates than absolute levels of poverty (Blau and Blau, 1982).