Assessing the Impact of Nightlight Gradients on Street Robbery and Burglary in Cincinnati of Ohio State, USA

Hanlin Zhou,Minxuan Lan,Bo Yang,Zengli Wang,Lin Liu

doi:10.3390/rs11171958

Abstract

Previous research has recognized the importance of edges to crime. Various scholars have explored how one specific type of edges such as physical edges or social edges affect crime, but rarely investigated the importance of the composite edge effect. To address this gap, this study introduces nightlight data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite sensor on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (NPP-VIIRS) to measure composite edges. This study defines edges as nightlight gradients—the maximum change of nightlight from a pixel to its neighbors. Using nightlight gradients and other control variables at the tract level, this study applies negative binomial regression models to investigate the effects of edges on the street robbery rate and the burglary rate in Cincinnati. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) of models show that nightlight gradients improve the fitness of models of street robbery and burglary. Also, nightlight gradients make a positive impact on the street robbery rate whilst a negative impact on the burglary rate, both of which are statistically significant under the alpha level of 0.05. The different impacts on these two types of crimes may be explained by the nature of crimes and the in-situ characteristics, including nightlight.

Highlights

Previous studies have explored criminal opportunities in different geographical areas [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
The fact that Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) values in Model 2 and Model 4 are lower than those in Model 1 and Model 3 respectively suggests that nightlight gradients consistently improve the negative binomial regression models for both the street robbery rate and the burglary rate
African-American Rate makes a positive impact on crime rates in all models, so a tract with higher ethnic heterogeneity is associated with a higher rate of street robbery and burglary

Summary

Introduction

Previous studies have explored criminal opportunities in different geographical areas [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Crime rates are high in areas marked by a minimum of personal, intimate social interaction [12]. These areas, containing mixes of land use and physical spaces, tend to have more crime generators and attractors [1,13,14,15,16,17,18]. A body of research has theorized the importance of boundaries of geographic units in the location of crime [19,20,21,22,23] These spatial boundaries, such as physical boundaries and social boundaries, are defined as “edges” by Brantingham and Brantingham [14]. This study aims to explore the possible impact of composite edges measured by nightlight gradients on street robbery and burglary

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion