Michael Leitner

Michael Leitner
Louisiana State University | LSU · Department of Geography and Anthropology

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67
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Publications

Publications (67)
Chapter
Geographies of crime are based on the spatial concept that combines social, natural, and environmental sciences. Geographic information systems crime analysts are highly sought after by law enforcement agencies from the local to the international level around the globe. Positive spatial autocorrelation (SA) is an arrangement where crime locations w...
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This research compares and evaluates different approaches to approximate offense times of crimes. It contributes to and extends all previously proposed naïve and aoristic temporal approximation methods and one recent study [1] that showed that the addition of historical crimes with accurately known time stamps to temporal approximation methods can...
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Spatial crime analysis, together with perceived (crime) safety analysis have tremendously benefitted from Geographic Information Science (GISc) and the application of geospatial technology. This research study discusses a novel methodological approach to document the use of emerging geospatial technologies to explore perceived urban safety from the...
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On 22 April 2018, the authors were invited by the Editor-in-Chief, Prof [...]
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Background: Predictive policing and crime analytics with a spatiotemporal focus get increasing attention among a variety of scientific communities and are already being implemented as effective policing tools. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview and evaluation of the state of the art in spatial crime forecasting focusing on study desi...
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Sporting events attract high volumes of people, which in turn leads to increased use of social media. In addition, research shows that sporting events may trigger violent behavior that can lead to crime. This study analyses the spatial relationships between crime occurrences, demographic, socio-economic and environmental variables, together with ge...
Chapter
The term urban ‘blightscape’ refers to cartographic visualizations of urban blight locations. Such locations describe disordered neighborhoods in urban areas characterized by the deterioration of properties and the environment. The creation of urban ‘blightscapes’ is explored from data collection to final mapping in five selected neighborhoods of B...
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In this research, the spatial video technology is applied to the collection of soccer-related graffiti locations in the city of Krakow, Poland. Krakow is predestined for this research due to the long and often violent rivalry between fan groups of the two major soccer teams, MKS Cracovia and Wisla Krakow. This form of rivalry is often expressed by...
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Human activities in marine coastal areas may coincide with protected areas for birds. Some of these anthropogenic activities may pose threats, such as gillnet fisheries, which can significantly affect populations of diving birds, especially gregarious species that gather in huge flocks in small areas such as Greater Scaup (Aythya marila). The Odra...
Conference Paper
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In this paper we forecast hotspots of street crime in Portland, Oregon. Our approach uses geosocial media posts, which define the predictors in geographically weighted regression (GWR) models. We use two predictors that are both derived from Twitter data. The first one is the population at risk of being victim of street crime. The second one is the...
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In this paper, we introduce two methods to forecast apartment burglaries that are based on repeat and near repeat victimization. While the first approach, the “heuristic method” generates buffer areas around each new apartment burglary, the second approach concentrates on forecasting near repeat chain links. These near repeat chain links are events...
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The use of social media data for the spatial analysis of crime patterns during social events has proven to be instructive. This study analyzes the geography of crime considering hockey game days, criminal behaviour, and Twitter activity. Specifically, we consider the relationship between geolocated crime-related Twitter activity and crime. We analy...
Article
The most prominent law in geography is Tobler’s first law (TFL) of geography, which states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” No other law in geography has received more attention than TFL. It is important because many spatial statistical methods have been developed since its publi...
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Crowd-based events, such as football matches, are considered generators of crime. Criminological research on the influence of football matches has consistently uncovered differences in spatial crime patterns, particularly in the areas around stadia. At the same time, social media data mining research on football matches shows a high volume of data...
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Population at risk of crime varies due to the characteristics of a population as well as the crime generator and attractor places where crime is located. This establishes different crime opportunities for different crimes. However, there are very few efforts of modeling structures that derive spatiotemporal population models to allow accurate asses...
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Environmental criminological theory is well-developed [1,2] but analytical techniques to explore and model crime incidents are lagging behind. Due to the emergence and accumulation of a wide range of environmental data [3], volunteered geographic information [4], unstructured textual information [5], and (big) statistical data [6], among others, it...
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Geographical masking is the conventional solution to protect the privacy of individuals involved in confidential spatial point datasets. The masking process displaces confidential locations to protect individual privacy while maintaining a fine level of spatial resolution. The adaptive form of this process aims to further minimize the displacement...
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Background Little is known about the effects of lithium intake through drinking water on suicide. This intake originates either from natural rock and soil elution and/or accumulation of lithium-based pharmaceuticals in ground water. Aims To examine the interplay between natural lithium in drinking water, prescribed lithium-based pharmaceuticals and...
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Geographical masks are a group of location protection methods for the dissemination and publication of confidential and sensitive information, such as health- and crime-related geo-referenced data. The use of such masks ensures that privacy is protected for the individuals involved in the datasets. Nevertheless, the protection process introduces sp...
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Crime is an ubiquitous part of society. The way people express their concerns about crimes has been of particular interest to the scientific community. Over time, the numbers and kinds of available communication channels have increased. Today, social media services, such Twitter, present a convenient way to express opinions and concerns about crime...
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Advances in Geographic Information Science (GISc) and the increasing availability of location data have facilitated the dissemination of crime data and the abundance of crime mapping websites. However, data holders acknowledge that when releasing sensitive crime data there is a risk of compromising the victims' privacy. Hence, protection methodolog...
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We examined published maps containing sensitive data, and the protection methods, if any, that were used. We investigated whether the many published warnings about disclosure risk have been effective in reducing privacy risk. During an 8-year period (2005-2012), 19 journals related to GIScience, geography, spatial crime analysis, and health geograp...
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The Web 2.0 technology introduced dynamic web mapping, which in turn has dramatically changed the distribution and use of geographical information in our society. Some of the many advantages of online mapping include the fast information dissemination to the public, the interactivity between the users and the map interface, as well as the frequent...
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Crime intelligence analysis and criminal investigations are increasingly making use of geospatial methodologies to improve tactical and strategic decision-making. However, the full potential of geospatial technologies is yet to be exploited. In particular, geospatial technology currently applied by law enforcement is somewhat limited in handling th...
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This article presents a data-driven framework for housing market segmentation. Local marginal house price surfaces are investigated by means of mixed geographically weighted regression and are reduced to a set of principal component maps, which in turn serve as input for spatial regionalization. The out-of-sample prediction error of a hedonic prici...
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Metropolitan areas today are faced with pervasive changes of their urban spatial structure and are reshaped by postsuburbanization processes. In this study, one example of such postsuburban restructuring, the multinucleated monofunctional clustering of higher-order services, is investigated in the urban fringe of Vienna, Austria. The methodological...
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Suicide, the tenth leading cause of death worldwide, is a complex phenomenon. Models aiming to explain the interaction of ambient variables such as socioeconomic factors, lithium content of drinking water and altitude are poorly developed. While controlling for several risk factors, this research bridges two different, but complementary research li...
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Reverse geocoding is defined as the extraction of textual information, such as a name or an address, from geographic coordinates. This technique is common in many geo-application scenarios, e.g., in freely available online-based mapping services. However, if personal data are mapped, confidentiality issues may arise, such as if the data are derived...
Chapter
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The analysis and understanding of spatial crime patterns is crucial for law enforcements to improve strategic and tactical decision-making. In this context, generalized linear models, such as count regressions, are commonly applied. These non-spatial models are challenged by spatial autocorrelation effects, contradicting fundamental model assumptio...
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Lithium as a substance occurring naturally in food and drinking water may exert positive effects on mental health. In therapeutic doses, which are more than 100 times higher than natural daily intakes, lithium has been proven to be a mood-stabilizer and suicide preventive. This study examined whether natural lithium content in drinking water is reg...
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This research assesses the impact that one natural disasterHurricane Katrinaand subsequent population movements have had on crime in the state of Louisiana. Using Index Crimes from the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement and population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, time series of violent and nonviolent crime rates were first analyzed u...
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The impact that natural disasters have on crime is still little known. In general, it is assumed that crime declines shortly after the disaster and slowly increases to pre-disaster levels over time. However, this assumption is not always confirmed by the few empirical studies that have been conducted to date. In this paper we analyze the impacts th...
Conference Paper
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The exploration of the spatial relationships between crime incidents, the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods, as well as physical and structural compositions of the urban landscape is an ongoing research issue in Geographic Information (GI) Science. Spatial data mining tools improve the ability to gain knowledge from geographic data and...
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Die Exploration räumlicher Beziehungen zwischen Kriminalität, sozio-ökonomischen und raumstrukturellen Merkmalen administrativer Einheiten ist ein aufstrebendes Forschungsfeld der Geoinformation. Räumliches Data Mining trägt dabei maßgeblich zum besseren Verständnis von geographischen Daten und raum-zeitlichen Prozessen bei. Die meisten Verfahren k...
Conference Paper
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This comparative analysis examines the suitability of commonly applied local cluster detection algorithms. The spatial distribution of an observed spatial crime pattern for Houston, TX, for August 2005 is examined by three different cluster detection methods, including the Geographical Analysis Machine, the Besag and Newell statistic, and Kulldorff...
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Currently urban spatial structures are affected by pervasive developments, which provoke a diversity and reorganization of population. This article examines the driving forces that cause urban-to-rural migration of population in the Austrian metropolitan area of Vienna using exploratory spatial analysis methods over the time period from 2001 to 200...
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This study tested different Bayesian Journey-to-Crime (JTC) models on a sample group of 850 serial offenders apprehended in Baltimore County, MD from 1993 to 1997. In this research, Bayesian JTC models were being used to predict the home locations of the offenders. The sample group data included 133 assaults, 90 burglaries, 497 larcenies, 81 robber...
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Traditional Journey-to-Crime (JTC) estimations are used to create probability surfaces from which a Geographic Profile is derived. While effective as a decision support tool, existing JTC methodologies do not account for the physical and cultural landscape in which serial offenders operate. This research proposes to enhance existing JTC techniques...
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The premise for this study is that the physical and cultural landscape has a deterministic effect on the location and distribution of serial crime. As a consequence, the distribution of linked crime scenes should exhibit a shape and orientation that is consistent with the underlying landscape. Geographic Profiling models that are able to account fo...
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The geoforensic analysis method is one of the earliest criminal geographic profiling models introduced by Newton in the late 1980s. The literature on geographic profiling acknowledges its existence, however, its methodological approach remains mostly unknown. The two main contributions of this research are first, to fill the gap in the spatial crim...
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As a Windows-based application, GeoDa 0.9.5-i is now much more user-friendly compared to its predecessor, the SpaceStat package and its Arc View Extension, DynESDA. GeoDa provides some very useful tools for doing exploratory spatial data analysis, including dynamically linked windows and data brushing. As a stand-alone program, it has a variety of...
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The immediate aftermath of Katrina focused the world's attention on the vulnerability of the urban poor and racial/ethnic minority groups in New Orleans. This vulnerability can be viewed in terms of site, the proximity of a neighborhood to a hazard, and situation, the social context of that neighborhood. Vulnerabilities, associated with demographic...
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This article evaluates the degree to which reverse address-matching (i.e., geospatial techniques that include scanning, geo-rectifying, and digitizing) would allow to recover personal data attached to the location of somebody’s residence from a map. Preliminary research results demonstrate that only after a few hours of instruction, novices to geos...
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This study examines the Global Positioning System (GPS) as a tool for field mapping of scattered human remains or other materials in forensic investigations. Two aspects of the GPS are considered: (1) the level of accuracy that can be obtained using a mid-priced GPS unit, and (2) the effectiveness of using the GPS to map scattered materials. The po...
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This study utilizes geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis (SA) technology to address the problems associated with prediction of location and effective recovery of dumped and scattered human remains in Louisiana. The goals are to determine if a selective bias exists in Louisiana as to where and when human remains are dumped and t...
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This research evaluates the usefulness of applying functional distance measures to criminal geographic profiles using mathematically calibrated distance decay models. Both the travel-path (i.e., shortest distance) and temporally optimized (i.e., quickest travel time) functional distance measures were calculated based on the impedance attributes sto...
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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can provide valuable insight into patterns of human activity. Online spatial display applications, such as Google Earth, can democratise this information by disseminating it to the general public. Although this is a generally positive advance for society, there is a legitimate concern involving the disclosure of...
Chapter
During a seminar presentation to the Geography and Anthropology Faculty at Louisiana State University, a series of summary statistics were presented concerning the racial inequality in infant health outcomes in Baton Rouge. The numbers were quite startling, spurring one colleague to question the accuracy of the findings, as, in their words, “that w...
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By the title you might think this chapter is a departure from the general theme of this book. I beg your indulgence as I plead my case, because pregnant women as a cohort have been tragically forgotten in the hazards and disaster literature. Although mapping of vulnerable populations is a recognized approach, I argue (and frequently have) that we n...
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I recently gave a presentation to an Introduction to Gender and Minority Studies class at Louisiana State University. This was an interesting experience, as most of my talks tend to lean on the technical aspects (meaning GIS) of how to solve the problem of racial disparity in birth outcomes in the city. This audience was nontechnical and more inter...
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The previous chapters have provided a background in factors related to infant and maternal health and the various ways these individual and neighborhood characteristics can be studied in a GIS environment. Though rich in information for approaching investigations in urban areas, this book has yet to delve into these issues from a rural perspective,...
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One of the purposes of this book is to introduce community health groups to the potential of GIS, a technology that can help in understanding the spatial landscape of prenatal risk. Therefore, one of the first steps is to provide a brief overview of GIS. This introduction will be split over the next two sections, with this chapter focused on data i...
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Four years have been spent analyzing infant health data for Baton Rouge. As with working with any dataset, one gets a feel for the data. One such feeling was that the population being studied was mobile. The first indication came when trying to categorize the different neighborhoods in which Healthy Start program participants lived. The main reason...
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n the opening chapters, GIS was broken into four general components, one of which was the spatial analysis of data. This is probably the least utilized of all GIS functions outside of an academic environment. A point that is often missed when discussing GIS is that the technology often exceeds the capabilities of the user. This is especially true i...
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The last chapter provided an introduction to two of the key components in a GIS: getting the data in, and then manipulating them to answer questions. This chapter considers how these data can be visualized and analyzed. The analysis section in this chapter will be fairly simplistic, as this topic is revisited again in Chapters V and VI with the int...
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This research proposes cartographic guidelines for presenting confidential point data on maps. Such guidelines do not currently exist, but are important for governmental agencies that disseminate personal data to the public because these agencies have to balance between the citizens’ right to know, and preserving a citizen’s right to privacy. In an...
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Zusammenfassung Die Auswirkungen von Naturkatastrophen auf die Kriminalität ist bis heute ein wenig un-tersuchtes Thema. Im Allgemeinen wird angenommen, dass die Kriminalität kurz nach der Naturkatastrophe sinkt und danach allmählich wieder auf das Niveau von vor der Naturka-tastrophe ansteigt. Diese Annahme wird aber nicht immer von den wenigen em...

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