Crime Mapping: Spatial and Temporal Challenges JERRY RATCLIFFE.

Crime opportunities are neither uniformly nor randomly organized in space and time. As

a result, crime mappers can unlock these spatial patterns and strive for a better theoretical

understanding of the role of geography and opportunity, as well as enabling practical crime

prevention solutions that are tailored to specific places. The evolution of crime mapping has

heralded a new era in spatial criminology, and a re-emergence of the importance of place as

one of the cornerstones essential to an understanding of crime and criminality. While early

criminological inquiry in France and Britain had a spatial component, much of mainstream

criminology for the last century has labored to explain criminality from a dispositional perspective,

trying to explain why a particular offender or group has a propensity to commit

crime. This traditional perspective resulted in criminologists focusing on individuals or on

communities where the community extended from the neighborhood to larger aggregations

(Weisburd et al. 2004). Even when the results lacked ambiguity, the findings often lacked

policy relevance. However, crime mapping has revived interest and reshaped many criminologists

appreciation for the importance of local geography as a determinant of crime that may

be as important as criminal motivation. Between the individual and large urban areas (such as

cities and regions) lies a spatial scale where crime varies considerably and does so at a frame

of reference that is often amenable to localized crime prevention techniques. For example,

without the opportunity afforded by enabling environmental weaknesses, such as poorly lit

streets, lack of protective surveillance, or obvious victims (such as overtly wealthy tourists or

unsecured vehicles), many offenders would not be as encouraged to commit crime.

This chapter seeks to make the case for crime mapping as an essential tool in the examination

of criminal activity; it also charges mainstream criminology to re-engage with the

practitioner interest in spatially targeted crime prevention. In the next section, I briefly outline

the theoretical support for a spatial approach to the crime problem and warn of the negative

outcomes that can potentially arise by ignoring the spatial dimensional of crime. After

a basic primer in mapping crime locations, the chapter looks at different ways that crime

hotspots can be identified. It also discusses the benefits of spatio-temporal crime mapping. The final section considers the future of crime mapping, both within the practitioner arena

and the academic sphere, concluding that a closer relationship between academics versed in

environmental criminology and the crime control field provides the best mechanism for mainstream

criminology to regain relevance to practitioners and policy makers. Readers looking

for extensive statistical routines, a “crime mapping for dummies” or a checklist of mapping

requirements will be disappointed as there are few equations and no elaborate discussions of

parameter choices; however, there is a section at the end of the chapter that will serve to point

the reader to these resources. Furthermore, this chapter should be read in conjunction with the

excellent chapter by Bernasco and Elffers in this book.