Patricia L. Brantingham

Simon Fraser University · School of Criminology

en Some urban spaces are associated with disproportionate numbers of criminal events, while other areas are relatively free from disorder and crime. The relationship between urban space and crime concentration has received increased attention in recent years, with the location quotient frequently presented as a tool to identify and quantify such co...

Despite environmental criminologists emphasizing the role that both space and time play in the occurrence of crime, there is still only a small literature on the temporal rhythms of criminal behavior, especially those of sexual violence. Drawing from routine activities theory, this research uses circular statistics to investigate the temporal patte...

Analysis of crime hot spots (spatial concentrations) and burning times (temporal concentrations) has become a major component of the work of criminologists, crime analysts and crime prevention practitioners. This paper lays out several specific elements of a expanded model of crime hot spot formation grounded in crime pattern theory.

Purpose Investigating the day of week and hour of day temporal patterns of crime typically show that (late) nights and weekends are the prime time for criminal activity. Though instructive, mental-health-related calls for service are a significant component of police service to the community that have not been a part of this research. The purpose o...

Modern Canadian criminological theory has evolved as a product of the demanding character of Canada's vast size and its historical evolution from disparate colonies of European empires to a nation state. That history created conditions for the development of criminological theory that seems similar to, but is different from, developed criminologica...

The current study investigates gender differences in the spatial distribution of the British Columbia Mental Health Act (MHA), criminal and non-criminal police calls-for-service involving emotionally disturbed persons (EDP). Using a sample of 4341 police incidents over a three-year period, 13 pairwise spatial comparisons of similarity were complete...

A range of spatial analyses are used in the field of crime mapping, such as kernel density estimation, Ripley's K-function, and spatial autocorrelation, but there is limited use of Voronoi diagrams (VDs). The goal of this article is to contribute to the spatial analysis of crime through the use of VDs. We use four years of commercial robbery data f...

Crime reduction and prevention strategies are vital for policymakers and law enforcement to face inevitable increases in urban crime rates as a side effect of the projected growth of urban population by the year 2030. Studies conclude that crime does not occur uniformly across urban landscapes but concentrates in certain areas. This phenomenon has...

Street profile analysis is a new method for analyzing temporal and spatial crime patterns along major roadways in metropolitan areas. This crime mapping technique allows for the identification of crime patterns along these street segments. These are linear spaces where aggregate crime patterns merge with crime attractors/generators and human moveme...

A subset of persons with mental illness is at risk for becoming involved with the police, and an even smaller subset of emotionally disturbed persons (EDP) has multiple contacts over time. Not much is known, however, about the nature of these contacts and how the patterns of everyday life can lead to the initial contact with, and type of police res...

Criminologists have long-known that different locations have varying levels of risk for criminal victimization. Based on the geometry of crime and its corresponding crime generators and crime attractors, edges (boundaries between relatively homogeneous neighborhoods) are locations with an elevated risk of criminal victimization. In this article, we...

Environmental criminology began as a novel addition to criminology in the 1970s by calling for a shift in focus from offenders exclusively to the multidisciplinary exploration of criminal events. This involved the study and analysis of crimes, crime sequences, clusters of crimes, and the patterns yielded by them. This analysis always considered peo...

The article presents an argument for supplementing traditional crime rates with crime location quotients (LQC) for purposes of explaining crime patterns within rural environments. Although largely ignored in the past, the overrepresentation of rural violence requires assessment for crime reduction purposes. Focusing on property and violent offences...

Current research on fear of crime reveals a recurrent theme of disorder in explanations of fear of crime and perceptions of security. This disorder is scalable, ranging from proximal cues associated with specific encounters between people or defined micro locations through to distal feelings of fear about areas, activity nodes, or major pathways. T...

Crime reduction and prevention strategies are essential to increase public safety and reduce the crime costs to society. Law enforcement agencies have long realized the importance of analyzing co-offending networks---networks of offenders who have committed crimes together---for this purpose. Although network structure can contribute significantly...

Objectives The main objective of this study was to see if the characteristics of offenders’ crimes exhibit spatial patterning in crime neutral areas by examining the relationship between simulated travel routes of offenders along the physical road network and the actual locations of their crimes in the same geographic space. Method This study intr...

Performance measures depend on the clarity and consistency of their metrics. The standard unit of analysis of court proceedings is the “case.” Yet the definition of a case varies widely. It may include multiple accused persons and charges, a count of accused persons, the number of informations (a set of charges), or the number of charges. Likewise,...

In this paper we present a new approach in the analysis of crime patterns by creating a formal framework for merging the concepts of crime attractors and the pull of certain locations on offender movement. This directionality, inherent to city infrastructure, underlies the decision processes of offenders when choosing movement paths towards attract...

Crime Pattern Theory offers a theoretical framework for a micro level explanation of the dynamics of crime in an urban environment. The research focuses on the novel use the concept of boundaries or edges to analyze micro level differences in crime in various urban neighborhoods. Edges are identified where there is dissimilarity between adjacent ar...

There are three interconnected and fundamental elements that define the spatiality of crime: places, distances, and directions. Over the past 180 years, research has flourished for the first two fundamental elements with relatively little research on directionality. In this article, we develop a visualization technique allowing for the display of t...

Within spatial analysis, the decision-making process of individuals involves six interconnected and fundamental elements: current location, destination, distances, and directions, time budgets and type of activity, all of which influence the movement of people in their environment. In this paper we develop a visualization technique allowing for the...

Predictive policing seeks to allocate scarce resources where and when they are most needed. Yet analysis is often based on recorded crime data that typically understate the concentration of crime at the same places or against the same people. This study outlines a means of developing more accurate estimates, termed the Recorded Repeats Adjustment C...

This paper reports an exploratory research on the distribution of event complexity in the British Columbia court system. Analysis of event distribution shows that the frequency of events sharply decreases with the increase in the number of persons and counts. The most frequently observed type of event is the event that has one person involved with...

Understanding the temporal development and patterns of criminal networks is important for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to investigate and prevent crimes. Extracting and visualizing criminal networks from a large amount of crime data has been a challenge over the past years. In particular, the visualization of the dynamic development of...

According to Crime Pattern Theory, individuals all have routine daily activities which require frequent travel between several nodes, with each being used for a different purpose, such as home, work or shopping. As people move between these nodes, their familiarity with the spatial area around the nodes, as well as between nodes, increases. Offende...

The fear of crime refers to the fear of being a victim of potential crimes. This fear often restricts normal daily activities and lowers the quality of life. For elderly people, fear of crime has a practical effect on their activities. Thus, the study of the fear of crime has been one of the important subjects in the victimization study. However, s...

In the current study we develop a Criminal Movement Model (CriMM) to investigate the relationship between simulated travel routes of offenders along the physical road network and the actual locations of their crimes in the same geographic space. With knowledge of offenders' home locations and the locations of major attractors, we are able to model...

Crime and terrorism in the 21st century call for advancement in the modeling and simulation of criminal events in the complex environment. This presentation reviews the field of computational criminology, an emerging blend of criminology, computer science and applied mathematics. Modern concerns about public safety and security include a focus on a...

We propose here a computational framework for co-offending network mining defined in terms of a process that combines formal data modeling with data mining of large crime and terrorism data sets as gathered and maintained by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Our crime data analysis aims at exploring relevant properties of criminal networks...

Objectives To utilize a “human-in-the-loop” simulation methodology to examine the impact of high-risk environmental contexts on perceptions of victimization risk. Methods Fifty-nine participants navigated a virtual environment and encountered five two-alternative forced-choice decision points, with one alternative representing a high-risk environme...

This paper reports an exploratory research on the distribution of event complexity in the British Columbia court system. Analysis of event distribution shows that the frequency of events sharply decreases with the increase in the number of persons and counts. The most frequently observed type of event is the event that has one person involved with...

The spatial distribution of crime has been a long-standing interest in the field of criminology. Research in this area has shown that activity nodes and travel paths are key components that help to define patterns of offending. Little research, however, has considered the influence of activity nodes on the spatial distribution of crimes in crime ne...

The symposium in this issue of Cityscape focuses on understanding crime and the urban environ -ment, particularly how people live in and interact with the landscape (buildings, people, roads, and activities) that surrounds them. It advances understanding of crime within the urban landscape. Ronald E. Wilson describes crime and the urban environment...

Fear of crime is a central topic in the field of victimization. In particular, criminologists are interested in the environmental structures and cues that generate fear. Research has shown that fear of crime has a direct impact on pedestrian navigation through the urban setting. Most studies have used traditional methods such as surveys or intervie...

Computational criminology is an area of research that joins advanced theories in criminology with theories and methods in mathematics, computing science, geography and behavioural psychology. It is a multidisciplinary approach that takes the strengths of several disciplines and, with semantic challenges, builds new methods for the analysis of crime...

Recent work (12) shows that conventional privacy preserving publishing techniques based on anonymity-groups are susceptible to corruption attacks. In a corruption attack, if the sensitive information of any anonymity-group member is uncovered, then the remaining group members are at risk. In this study, we abandon anonymity-groups and hide sensitiv...

Computational and mathematical methods arguably have an enormous potential for serving practical needs in crime analysis and prevention by offering novel tools for crime investigations and experimental platforms for evidence-based policy making. We present a comprehensive formal framework and tool support for mathematical and computational modeling...

Patterns in crime vary quite substantially at different scales of aggregation, in part because data tend to be organized around standardized, artificially defined units of measurement such as the census tract, the city boundary, or larger administrative or political boundaries. The boundaries that separate units of data often obscure the detailed s...

The visualization of areal census data is sensitive to the modifiable areal unit problem. Consequently, though not widely used, dasymetric mapping procedures have been developed to provide a more convincing representation of such areal data. This article extends past research on dasymetric mapping procedures to visualize fine-resolution raster data...

The built environment impacts on the patterns of crime in many different ways. The distribution and clustering of different land uses is thought, on theoretical grounds, to play an important role in where and when crimes occur. This study analysed the patterns of assault and motor vehicle theft in relation to the distribution of land uses across mo...

ABSTRACT Virtual/mixed reality 3D models of real -world environments,can be used,to run behavioural and other experiments with real human subjects, replacing the traditional approach where studies,are,conduct ed,in,physical environments.,Use,of the,virtual/mixed,reality environments can minimize problems related to feasibility, experimental control...

Pattern and routine activities theories suggest that through a combination of decisions and innate understandings of environmental cues, likely offenders are able to separate good criminal opportunities from bad risks. The nature of this process is highly structured and allows researchers to anticipate likely concentrations for a variety of regular...

Criminal justice systems are complex. They are composed of several major subsystems, including the police, courts, and corrections, which are in turn composed of many minor subsystems. Predicting the response of a criminal justice system to change is often difficult. Mathematical modeling and computer simulation can serve as powerful tools for unde...

Pattern and routine activities theories suggest that through a combination of decisions and innate understandings of environmental cues, likely offenders are able to separate good criminal opportunities from bad risks. The nature of this process is highly structured and allows researchers to anticipate likely concentrations for a variety of regular...

Criminal justice systems are complex. They are composed of several major subsystems, including the police, courts, and corrections, which are in turn composed of many minor subsystems. Predicting the response of a criminal justice system to change is often difficult. Mathematical modeling and computer simulation can serve as powerful tools for unde...

Understanding current costs of police services requires an understanding of past costs and past demands for police services. This research explores how demands for police services vary over time and whether or not the amount of work necessary to respond to calls for police services increased or decreased. This research uses an activity based timing...

This article outlines several principles of Environmental Criminology and demonstrates their application in a case study of a multi-family design proposal in Vancouver British Columbia. Principles of environmental criminology can be used by architects, urban designers, landscape architects, and planners to reduce the likelihood of crime in specific...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to computational modeling of social systems. By combining the abstract state machine (ASM) formalism with the multi-agent modeling paradigm, we obtain a formal semantic framework for modeling and integration of established theories of crime analysis and prediction. We focus here on spatial and temporal asp...

Synopsis Understanding current costs of police services requires an understanding of past costs and past demands for police services. This research explored how demands for police services from the RCMP in British Columbia varied over the past 30 years and whether the amount of work necessary to respond to calls for police services increased or dec...

This article provides information about the evolving field of situational crime prevention and proposes that the situational perspective be used to understand recent crime prevention approaches in Canada. The article also explores how the articulated description of situational crime prevention can be used to develop ways of measuring the impact of...