The Next Step: A Spatiotemporal Statistical Model of the Birth and Death of Crime Hot Spots

Abstract

The Criminology of Place is an important book. It brings together more than two decades of research by Weisburd and colleagues on the question of why it is that one street corner or block face can be in the 99th percentile of calls for service while an adjacent location is virtually crime free. The concentration of crime and disorder at discrete locations is one of the most striking empirical regularities in criminology not only because of its important implications for the strategic use of police to prevent crime but also for its implications for understanding the causes of crime. On its face the highly disproportionate concentration of crime at discrete locations is at odds with, or at least, is inexplicable with sociologically-based theories of the causes of crime that emphasize the role of community-level factors such social disorganization or collective efficacy or even higher level macro-structural forces such as inequality of opportunity. Similarly, economics-based theories of crime with their emphasis on the role of incentives such as sanction risk and legal alternatives to crime are silent on the phenomenon of crime hot spots. Weisburd, Groff, and Yang offer the most thorough currently available exploration of the capacity of extant theory to explain the hot spots phenomenon.