Space-time analysis of burglary in Beijing

Abstract

In recent years, in addition to the development of environmental criminology, how crime is distributed in space and have been broadly studied and numerous crime patterns have been discovered. These findings made significant contributions to the progress of problem-oriented policing policy, especially crime forecasting and deployment of police resource. However, for some reasons, this research, especially the spatial and temporal crime analysis, is still absent in China. Therefore, in this article, we collected 5-month burglary recordings in Beijing and use spatio-temporal analysing methods to investigate property offending patterns in the second largest city of China. Initially, descriptive methods are used to analyse the crime patterns in space and time separately; the results indicate that the offences are significantly clustered in space and consecutively correlated with past history in time. Following that work, a disease contagion testing strategy is used to investigate the burglary risk in space and time. The findings indicate that the offence risk communicates at least 3 weeks within 200 m of an offended place, which shows near-repeat pattern. At end of this article, the significance of environmental crime analysis to the crime prevention in China is discussed.