Examining the impact of the precision of address geocoding on estimated density of crime locations

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This study examines the impact of the precision of address geocoding on the estimated density of crime locations in a large urban area of Japan. The data consist of two separate sets of the same Penal Code offenses known to the police that occurred during a nine-month period of April 1, 2001 through December 31, 2001 in the central 23 wards of Tokyo. These two data sets are derived from older and newer recording system of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (TMPD), which revised its crime reporting system in that year so that more precise location information than the previous years could be recorded. Each of these data sets was address-geocoded onto a large-scale digital map, using our hierarchical address-geocoding schema, and was examined how such differences in the precision of address information and the resulting differences in address-geocoded incidence locations affect the patterns in kernel density maps. An analysis using 11,096 pairs of incidences of residential burglary (each pair consists of the same incidents geocoded using older and newer address information, respectively) indicates that the kernel density estimation with a cell size of 25×25 m and a bandwidth of 500 m may work quite well in absorbing the poorer precision of geocoded locations based on data from older recording system, whereas in several areas where older recording system resulted in very poor precision level, the inaccuracy of incident locations may produce artifactitious and potentially misleading patterns in kernel density maps.