Cartography of crime: Portrait of metropolitan Vilnius

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, geographic research in criminology deals mainly with data analysis and accompanying cartographic communication through the visualisation of crime maps is less developed. Therefore, there is still a dearth of crime maps that could potentially not only show the facts, but also portray the criminal landscape of the city and tell the reader a story in a way that stimulates thinking, and motivates deeper analysis and spatial reasoning. This set of maps, which were designed by the authors, represent specific characteristics, density and temporal distribution of crimes in the city of Vilnius in 2014. It also shows changes in the crime rate from 2012 to 2014. The maps represent generalised data that was derived from detailed tabular data on reported criminal activities in 2012, 2013, and 2014. The primary map reveals some primary factors that allow understanding of spatio-temporal patterns of crimes in modern Vilnius: prevalent crime types with specific territorial and temporal distribution (crimes of violence, property crimes, and distribution/possession of drugs); changes in distribution over the examined period of 3 recent years; overall crime rate and detailed structure of 9 types of crimes, the rate of burglaries and seasonality of violent crimes for all the 21 administrative districts of the city. Original cartographic signs have been designed for the depiction of 11 characteristics. The maps are supplemented by 3D visualisations and a chart that shows changes in the overall crime rate and juvenile crime numbers in the decade from 2004 to 2014. The reference scale is 1:100,000 for the Main map and 1:300,000 for complementary maps.