The Influence of Intra-Daily Activities and Settings upon Weekday Violent Crime in Public Spaces in Manchester, UK

Won Do Lee,Mark Ellison,Jon Bannister,Muhammad Salman Haleem

doi:10.1007/s10610-020-09456-1

Abstract

People ebb and flow across the city. The spatial and temporal patterning of crime is, in part, reflective of this mobility, of the scale of the population present in any given setting at a particular time. It is also a function of capacity of this population to perform an active role as an offender, victim or guardian in any specific crime type, itself shaped by the time-variant activities undertaken in, and the qualities of, particular settings. To this end, this paper explores the intra-daily influence of activities and settings upon the weekday spatial and temporal patterning of violent crime in public spaces. This task is achieved through integrating a transient population dataset with travel survey, point-of-interest and recorded crime data in a study of Great Manchester (UK). The research deploys a negative binomial regression model controlling for spatial lag effects. It finds strong and independent, but time-variant, associations between leisure activities, leisure settings and the spatial and temporal patterning of violent crime in public space. The paper concludes by discussing the theoretical and empirical implications of these findings.

Highlights

There is a long-standing recognition of the necessity to calculate population denominators with reference to specific crime types (Boggs 1965)
In this paper, which examines violent crime in public spaces, and reflective of the data qualities at our disposal, we identify the transient population as the best measure of the exposed population-at-risk, i.e. excluding those at home, who would be unable to perform an active role in public spaces
Given that the primary aim of the research is to explore the influence of the timevariant activities of the exposed population-at-risk on violent crime in public spaces, which concentrates in town and city centres, the relative weakness of the Mobile Phone Origin Destination (MPOD) dataset in less populated areas is outweighed by its strength in town and city centre areas

Summary

Introduction

There is a long-standing recognition of the necessity to calculate population denominators with reference to specific crime types (Boggs 1965). Failure to do so may serve to inflate or deflate the crime rate (Song et al 2018), disguising the true nature of the crime problem and impeding its effective address To this end, Haleem et al (in this issue) introduced the concept of the exposed population-at-risk, defined as the mix of residents and non-residents who may play an active role as an offender, victim or guardian in a specific crime type, present in a spatial unit at a given time. Haleem et al (in this issue), challenge the appropriateness of applying ambient (i.e. total) population counts Instead, they argue that an exposed population count, defined as the mix of residents and non-residents who may play an active role as an offender, victim or guardian in a specific crime type, presents in a spatial unit at a given time, to be a more theoretically relevant population denominator. An emergent challenge is that of assessing the propensity, or shifting spatial and temporal propensities, of the exposed population-at-risk to perform an active role as an offender, victim or guardian

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Conclusion