Crime Analysis of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile: A Spatial Panel Data Approach

Abstract

The aim of our work is to determine the influence that socio-economic and demographic factors have had on crimes that have taken place during the period 2010–2018 in the communes of the Metropolitan Region of Chile, as well as the existence of possible spatial or temporal effects. We address 12 kinds of crime that we have grouped into two main types: against people and against property. Our interest focuses on crimes against people, using crimes against property as an additional covariate in order to investigate the existence of the broken-windows phenomenon in this context. The model chosen for our analysis is a spatial panel model with fixed effects. The results highlight that covariates such as infant mortality, birth rate, poverty and green areas have a significant influence on crimes against people. Regarding the spatio-temporal covariates, one effect observed is that there is a displacement of crime towards neighbouring communes, leaving open a new line of study to discover the causes of this displacement.