David Buil-Gil

The University of Manchester · Department of Criminology

Worry about crime is known to be higher in some European regions than others. However, cross-national surveys, which are the main source of information to map worry about crime across Europe, are designed to be representative of large areas (countries), and regions often suffer from small and unrepresentative sample sizes. This research produces re...

This research examines the geographical distribution of perceived neighbourhood disorder in Manchester, England, by using small area estimates. Sample surveys are the main source of information to analyse perceived disorder. However, most surveys are only representative of large areas, and direct estimates may be unreliable at small area level. Sma...

For decades, criminologists have been aware of the severe consequences of the dark figure of police records for crime prevention strategies. Crime surveys are developed to address the limitations of police statistics as crime data sources, and estimates produced from surveys can mitigate biases in police data. This paper produces small area estimat...

The reporting of crime to the police is crucial for an efficient functioning of the criminal justice system. It is widely argued that victims’ decision to contact the police is based on considerations of the anticipated costs and benefits of crime reporting. Scholars have previously suggested that victims’ attitudes towards the police may influence...

Cybercrime is on the rise, and so is the need to systematically analyze its prevalence, distribution, causes and consequences. While official records (mainly police, prosecution and court statistics) provide important information to explore online crime, they have been subject to extensive criticism due to the presence of measurement error arising...

Crime data are problematic: Crimes that are never reported undermine its validity and differences in police recording practices affect its reliability. However, the true extent of these problems is not well known, with existing studies suffering from a number of methodological limitations. We examine the quality of police recorded crime data and su...

Contemporary criminology issues are increasingly global, cross-cultural, and multilingual. Moreover, students from different cultural and national backgrounds will need to apply data analytics in their respective contexts. Crime data used in statistical courses should reflect this diversity, and in turn enhance the equality and inclusivity of the t...

Victimization is concentrated among few individuals, commonly referred to as polyvictims. Yet, there exists a lack of consensus regarding the operationalization of polyvictimization. This study investigates the impact of using different measures of polyvictimization on the identification of polyvictims and outcomes of regression models. Operational...

Perceptions of personal security significantly affect human behaviour in geographical environments. The way public places are perceived determines their utilization and their attractiveness among urban residents. Various methods have been applied to study perceptions of security and the environmental factors associated with it. Urban environments c...

Crime data is essential to the running of a safe society. But are we measuring crime in the best way? Ian Brunton-Smith, Alexandru Cernat, David Buil-Gil and Jose Pina-Sánchez explore how the current system could be improved

The article discusses the growing ethical concern of geodata privacy in geographical research. It highlights the challenges and provides ways for researchers and practitioners to be aware of these issues. We highlight open problems and areas for research, focusing on topics such as appropriate anonymization, responsible data dissemination, and the...

It is well known that police recorded crime data is susceptible to substantial measurement error. However, despite its limitations, police data is widely used in regression models exploring the causes and effects of crime, which can lead to different types of bias. Here, we introduce a new R package ('rcme': Recounting Crime with Measurement Error)...

This article presents a discussion of the emerging ethical issue of geodata pri-vacy in geographical research. The paper highlights the importance of consider-ing challenges to privacy when working with geographically explicit data and explores explicit ways in which researchers and practitioners can be conscious of these issues. Through summarisin...

Cybercrime is on the rise, and so is the need to systematically analyze its prevalence, distribution, causes, and consequences. While official records (mainly police, prosecution and court statistics) provide important information to explore online crime, they have been subject to extensive criticism due to the presence of measurement error arising...

Objectives: Police-recorded crimes are used by police forces to document community differences in crime and design spatially targeted strategies. Nevertheless, crimes known to police are affected by selection biases driven by underreporting. This paper presents a simulation study to analyze if crime statistics aggregated at small spatial scales are...

The connection of home electronic devices to the internet allows remote control of physical devices and involves the collection of large volumes of data. With the increase in the uptake of Internet-of-Things home devices, it becomes critical to understand the digital harms of smart homes. We present a systematic literature review on the security an...

Objectives Assess the extent to which measurement error in police recorded crime rates impact the estimates of regression models exploring the causes and consequences of crime.Methods We focus on linear models where crime rates are included either as the response or as an explanatory variable, in their original scale or log-transformed. Two measure...

Police-recorded crime data is commonly used to assess the crime risk of tourists and locals. Police records, however, are affected by different crime reporting rates across population groups. No research has explored the different crime reporting propensities of tourists and locals. We analyse two sets of surveys in Barcelona, a general population...

It has been long known that police recorded crime data is susceptible to substantial measurement error. However, despite its limitations, police data is widely used in regression models exploring the causes and effects of crime. Furthermore, because of the complex error mechanisms affecting police data, attempts to adjust for their impact are rare...

Police-recorded crime data are prone to measurement error, affecting our understanding of the nature of crime. Research has responded to this problem using data from surveys and emergency services. These data sources are not error-free, and data from different sources are not always easily comparable. This study compares violent crime data recorded...

“La composición del crimen: Una aproximación analítica” introduce los principales conceptos, teorías y evidencias sobre el estudio del crimen, invitando a toda persona interesada a adentrarse en este apasionante ámbito de estudio. El reto que nos planteamos en este libro es presentar una visión analítica sobre el fenómeno criminal. Nos preguntamos...

We assess if asking victims about the places where crimes happen leads to estimates of “crime in place” with better measurement properties. We analyze data from the Barcelona Victimization Survey (2015–2020) aggregated in 73 neighborhoods using longitudinal quasi-simplex models and criterion validity to estimate the quality of four types of survey-...

Although it is known that businesses report cybercrime to public authorities at a low rate, and this hinders prevention strategies, there is a lack of research on companies’ decisions to report cyber victimisation. This paper analyses the UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey to explore factors associated with cybercrime reporting by businesses. Result...

Crime research has repeatedly shown that small proportions of offenders are responsible for large proportions of crimes. While there is a substantial body of evidence for this ‘offending concentration’ in connection to traditional offline crime, there is limited research assessing the concentration of offending for cybercrime. This research analyze...

Much research has shown that the first lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were associated with changes in routine activities and, therefore, changes in crime. While several types of violent and property crime decreased immediately after the first lockdown, online crime rates increased. Nevertheless, little research has explored...

Much research has shown that the first lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were associated with changes in routine activities and, therefore, changes in crime. While several types of violent and property crime decreased immediately after the first lockdown, online crime rates increased. Nevertheless, little research has explored...

The unprecedented changes in routine activities brought about by COVID-19 and the associated lockdown measures contributed to a reduction in opportunities for predatory crimes in outdoor physical spaces, while people spent more time connected to the internet, and opportunities for cybercrime and fraud increased. This article applies time-series ana...

We assess if asking victims about the places where crimes happen leads to estimates of ‘crime in place’ with better measurement properties. We analyse data from the Barcelona Victimization Survey (2015 to 2020) aggregated in 73 neighbourhoods using longitudinal quasi-simplex models and criterion validity to estimate the quality of four types of sur...

Purpose: Romance fraud refers to situations where an individual is deceived for financial gain by someone with whom the victim perceives to be in a romantic relationship. With the increase in internet use, the growth in loneliness, and the increasing engagement in online dating sites during COVID-19, opportunities for romance fraud may have suffere...

There have been many warnings about the rising threat of cybercrime and fraud resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown measures and the associated increase in Internet use. However, there is still relatively little data with which to support the alerts and any changes may be nuanced. The present paper applies time series analysis methods to historical...

Objectives: Assess the extent to which measurement error in police recorded crime rates impact the estimates of regression models exploring the causes and consequences of crime. Methods: We focus on linear models where crime rates are included either as the response or as an explanatory variable, in their original scale, or log-transformed. Two me...

There is growing need for reliable survey-based small area estimates of crime and confidence in police work to design and evaluate place-based policing strategies. Crime and confidence in policing are geographically aggregated and police resources can be targeted to areas with the most problems. High levels of spatial autocorrelation in these varia...

Private organizations suffer great losses due to cybersecurity incidents, and they invest increasing resources to prevent attacks, but little is known about the effectiveness of cybersecurity measures for prevention. Based on the framework of Routine Activity Theory, this paper analyzes the impact of companies' online activities and cybersecurity m...

Private organizations suffer great losses due to cybersecurity incidents, and they invest increasing resources to prevent attacks, but little is known about the effectiveness of cybersecurity measures for prevention. Based on the framework of Routine Activity Theory, this paper analyzes the impact of companies’ online activities and cybersecurity m...

Open and crowdsourced data are becoming prominent in social sciences research. Crowdsourcing projects harness information from large numbers of citizens who voluntarily participate in one collaborative project, and allow new insights into people's attitudes and perceptions. However, these data may be affected by a series of biases that limit their...

Victimization surveys provide key information about crimes known and unknown to the police, and are the main source of data to analyze perceived safety and trust in the police. These surveys, however, are only designed to allow the aggregation of responses and production of reliable direct estimates (i.e., weighted means or totals) at very large sp...

Crowdsourcing refers to the practise of enlisting the knowledge, experience or skills of a large number of people (the crowd) through some digital platform to collect data towards a collaborative project. Crowdsourcing can generate large volumes of data in relatively little time at a very small cost, and can be useful for research, strategic police...

Lockdown and social distancing policies to reduce COVID-19 provoked large-scale changes in people’s everyday lives. People spent more time at home and connected to the Internet. Cyber-dependent crime spiked during April in lockdown but returned to the long-term trend in June 2020. Fraud, which is numerically larger, showed less variation.

The COVID-19 outbreak and the far-reaching lockdown measures are having direct and indirect effects on complex social domains, including opportunities for crime offline and online. This paper presents preliminary analyses about the short-term effect of COVID-19 and lockdown measures on cyber-dependent crime and online fraud in the UK. Time series a...

Few researches have considered fear of crime as a context-specific experience. This article promotes a place-based theoretical framework for studying crime perceptions through presenting app-based and crowdsourcing measures of perception of crime and place as a robust methodological framework. A systematic review of published studies that use crowd...

Police-recorded crimes are used by police forces to map crime patterns and design spatially-targeted strategies. Nevertheless, maps of crimes known to police are affected by selection biases driven by unequal crime reporting rates across social groups. This paper presents a simulation study to analyse the impact of selection biases on crime maps pr...

Desde hace algunas décadas, la investigación criminológica en España ha sido y está siendo un ámbito de investigación especialmente prolífico, y cada día son más los jóvenes que muestran su interés por iniciarse en la investigación académica en Criminología, síntoma de la buena salud de esta rama de las ciencias sociales. En este sentido, la Red Es...

The term 'Geographic Information Systems' (GIS) defines those computerised systems designed to gather, store, manage, visualise and analyse data with a spatial component. While GIS is generally used to refer to software applications created to manage geographic information, in truth GIS are also defined by other key components such as the spatial d...

Criminological research is moving towards the study of small geographic areas. Crime and crime perceptions are influenced by environmental features and contextual conditions that are more common in some places than others, and therefore these are unequally distributed in space. By visualising criminological phenomena with maps at small area level,...

Open and crowdsourced data are becoming prominent in social sciences research. Crowdsourcing projects harness information from large crowds of citizens who voluntarily participate into one collaborative project, and allow new insights into people’s attitudes and perceptions. However, these are usually affected by a series of biases that limit their...

Few researches have considered fear of crime as a context-specific experience. This paper promotes a place-based theoretical framework for studying crime perceptions through presenting app-based and crowdsourcing measures of perception of crime and place as a robust methodological framework. A systematic review of published studies that use crowdso...

The use of spatially correlated random area effects is increasingly in use in small area estimation field. The spatial Empirical Best Linear Unbiased Predictor (SEBLUP), which borrows strength from correlated random area effects between neighbouring areas, have shown to reduce the estimates' variance and bias, both under simulated and real populati...

Numerous researches have shown an unequal distribution of experiences of fear of crime in the urban environment. There are places that concentrate more events of fear of crime than others, showing that new methodologies are needed in order to put fear of crime on the map. The study of the socalled “hot spots of fear” has resulted in numerous theore...

La Criminología surge a principios del siglo XIX como respuesta a la demanda social de estudio de las fuentes del comportamiento antisocial siguiendo las bases del método científico, con la finalidad de promover mecanismos para su prevención y tratamiento. A partir de un análisis de la literatura criminológica de los últimos tres siglos, el present...

Durante los años ‘60, una serie de investigaciones realizadas en Estados Unidos de América, focalizaron por primera vez el interés de la Criminología en la parte subjetiva de la delincuencia, es decir, de qué manera la ciudadanía percibe la problemática delictiva más allá de cómo es objetivamente. Se observó que existía una parte de la seguridad su...