Prospective crime mapping in operational context Final report

Executive summaryThe systematic identification and management of risk is one element in the Home Office’sreform plan published on 19 July 2006, with a stated emphasis on proactivity in riskmanagement. The research reported here provides an innovative means of doing preciselythat in respect of one offence, describing and applying a technique whose extension to alloffence types would make a significant contribution to realisation of the Home Office’s reformagenda.Knowing when and where to deploy resources is pivotal to the crime reduction enterprise.The attempt to identify and police ‘hotspots’ of crime has for some time been a part of crimereduction strategy. The positive effects of such measures have been acknowledged, with arange of interventions based on this approach having significant impacts on levels of crime.The aim of the project reported here is to understand the regularities in patterns of burglaryacross a range of geographical areas and to develop and test an emerging forecastingtechnique, prospective mapping, thereby helping the police and their crime reduction partnersto prevent and detect more crime.The risk of burglary is not evenly distributed – some areas experience more burglary thanothers. Within areas, some homes are victimised more than the rest. However, little researchhas focused on the accurate prediction of which areas and locations are most likely toexperience burglary next. Research concerned with crime mapping has focused almostexclusively on the description of what happened last week, last month or over the last year,with the implicit assumption that the future will be much like the past. Insofar as crime moves(and it does), such an approach is at best sub-optimal. The current study sought to developan accurate way of forecasting where burglary is most likely to next occur, and to decidewhether the resulting system had potential for use in operational policing. In addition toaddressing the technical issues of how to forecast future patterns of burglary, the authorsattempted to identify issues of implementation that might impede police adoption of predictivemapping systems and how such mapping might be integrated with other approaches to crimereductionSpatial and temporal patterns of crime are fluid. Research by the authors and others haddemonstrated that the risk of burglary appears not only to move, but to cluster in space andtime in much the same way as a communicable disease. When a burglary occurs at onehome, another is likely to occur swiftly nearby. As time elapses, this risk decays so that afterfour to eight weeks, homes located near to a previously victimised home experience only alevel of risk normal for the area in which they are located. If such patterns are ubiquitous (anotion supported by the work reported), the risk of burglary moves. The consequence is thatthe location of future events might be better predicted by means more sophisticated than thesimple extrapolation of past patterns.The central aims of the project were as follows.• To determine whether patterns of burglary were communicable across diverse areasof the East Midlands, and if so, whether the pattern varied between areas.• To develop a predictive mapping system usable in an operational policing context.• To test the accuracy of the system and compare it with contending alternatives.• To determine how the system could be used operationally, identify obstacles toimplementation, establish how it was received by those who might use it, and identifynecessary refinements.• To provide an idea of the likely efficacy of the system during a field trial by evaluatingits impact on crime and influence on crime reduction strategies in the area.v