The Importance of Place in Policing - Empirical Evidence and Policy ...

such places. For example, several researchers have found that juveniledelinquency is strongly associated with time spent socializing inunstructured activities with peers in the absence of authority figures(Agnew & Peterson, 1989; Osgood, Wilson, O’Malley, Bachman, &Johnston, 1996; Wallace & Bachman, 1991). The fact that juvenilesare most likely to victimize other juveniles (Snyder, 2003) reinforcesthe importance of such activity spaces in the development of juvenilecrime.Data from Weisburd et al.’s (2009) study of juvenile crime in Seattleprovide strong confirmation of the relevance of juvenile activityspaces and routine activity theory for understanding the very highconcentration of juvenile arrest incidents at places. Weisburd et al.were able to identify where crime events occurred and thus theywere able to describe the activity spaces most associated with hotspots of juvenile crime (see Table 1). The highest rate trajectories ofjuvenile crime hot spots (see trajectories 6–8) were much more likelyto have arrest incidents committed at schools and/or youth centers,and shops/malls and restaurants, as compared to low rate trajectorygroups. In each of the low rate trajectory groups (1–4) fewer thanfour percent of the arrest incidents occurred at schools or youthcenters. However, more than 30 percent of the arrest incidents intrajectory group 8 occurred at a school or youth center. 12.7 percentof the incidents in trajectory group 7 and 17.1 percent of the incidentsin trajectory group 6 occurred at a school or youth center. Thedifferences between the high rate and low rate groups were evenmore pronounced when examining the proportion of arrest incidentsfound at shops, malls and restaurants. While fewer than 15 percentof incidents in each low rate trajectory group (1–4) occurred at thesetypes of locations, between 34.3 percent and 75.4 percent of arrestincidents in trajectories 6 through 8 occurred at shops, malls andrestaurants.31