Abstract
This paper uses transportation data to estimate how daily spatio-temporal shifts in population influence the distribution of crime over a city’s census tracts (CTs). A “funnel hypothesis” states that these daily flows are central for crime concentrations within a city. We present arguments for and against funneling prior to empirical analysis. A municipal transport agency in a large city in Eastern Canada surveyed 66,100 households about daily trips for work, shopping, recreation, and school. This allowed us to link inflows of visitors to numbers of property and violent crimes for 506 CTs. We find strong support for a funneling effect. Daily visitors have a major impact on distributions over this city for both violent and property crimes. Daily spatio-temporal shifts could be significantly more important than fixed residential factors for distributing crime over urban space.
Highlights
Ninety years ago, Burgess (1925) noted that people often commit crimes in census tracts (CTs) where they do not reside
That early finding is relevant to a contemporary research question—why does urban crime concentrate in some places? Such concentrations have long been associated with social features of the residential population, but it is increasingly evident that daily nonresidential activities distribute crime unevenly over space, beyond residential effects
Crime’s spatial concentration, without a temporal dimension Clarke and Eck (2005) have stated a larger rule of concentration, the 80–20 rule, which tells us that crime is highly concentrated among offenders, victims, or places
Summary
Spatio-temporal shifts could be significantly more important than fixed residential factors for distributing crime over urban space.
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