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Risk of Robbery in a Tourist Destination: A Monthly Examination of Atlantic City, New Jersey
Abstract
Purpose: : The purpose of the current study was to identify potential changes in crime generators and attractors based on monthly models in a high-tourist destination.
Design: A Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) approach was used to assess spatial relationships
between 27 crime generator and attractor types in Atlantic City, New Jersey with robbery
occurrence for the 2015 calendar year. Twelve separate monthly models were run to identify changes in risk factors based on month of the year.
Findings: Results indicated unique significant risk factors based on the month of the year. Over the warmer and summer months, there was a shift in environmental risk factors that falls in line with more of a change in routine activities for residents and tourists and related situational contexts for crime.
Practical Implications: The analytical approach used in the current study could be used by police departments and jurisdictions to understand types of crime generators and attractors influencing local crime occurrence. Subsequent analyses were used by Atlantic City Police Department to direct place-based policing efforts.
Originality/Value: With growing crime and place research that accounts for temporal scales, we advance these endeavors by focusing on a tourist destination, Atlantic City, New Jersey.
... Research on sporting event arenas/stadiums and theme parks have found that their presence and events contribute to crime occurrence (Vandeviver, Bernasco & Daele, 2019). Crime generators create concentrations of targets that could tempt both residents and tourists to criminal opportunities at those locations (Drawve, Kennedy, & Caplan, 2020). Residents are less likely to become victims because they know the spatial structure of their city/place of residence and can avoid these places. ...
... This could be just about any area that is low in crime (Brantingham, & Brantingham. 2003;Drawve et al. 2020). ...
... Studies have explored the reasons why some tourist resorts and tourists are at risk (Mawby, 2010(Mawby, , 2011(Mawby, , 2014Brantingham & Brantingham, 1995;Barker & Page 2002;Drawve et al. 2020;George, 2003;Hodgkinsoi & Tilley, 2007). Central to all these studies are four scopes: rewards, justifiability of target, guardianship and accessibility (Mawby, 2011). ...
This study evaluates crime and safety provisions (in line with Crime Prevention through Environmental Design [CPTED]) and identifies elements of environmental design that correlate crime incidences at a Nigerian tourist site. The study approach consisted of two steps: the on-site assessment of CPTED and an appraisal of crime incidences over a period of time. The on-site assessment was designed based on the international CPTED audit and site assessment specifications while crime incidences were collated from accessible information. Findings show that CPTED strategies (surveillance, access control, territoriality, activity support and image-maintenance) were applied on the site. Nevertheless, different places in the site did not meet CPTED standards except for activity support. Findings show notable spatial pattern variation in crime rate and this variation differs with regard to crime type and the varying environmental characteristics of the study area. Furthermore, significant relationships were observed for surveillance and theft; access control and robbery, fights, vandalism as well as theft; territoriality and robbery as well as fights and vandalism; activity support and theft. Findings show that there is still much to be done regarding environmental design elements on the site. Therefore, recommendations and future research implications are discussed. In a novel approach, this study builds on existing literature from an African perspective by conducting an on-site assessment of CPTED strategies on a foremost Nigerian tourist destination and possible links with crime.
... This connects with a plethora of anecdotal evidence documenting rioting and criminal activity following major sporting events (e.g., Kurland et al., 2014;Lewis, 2007;Roberts & Benjamin, 2000;Russell, 2004;Smith, 2018). Similarly, in their work, Caplan and colleagues (2020) identified shifting crime risk in Jersey City, N.J., across twelve discrete two-hour time intervals (see also : Drawve et al., 2020). While many factors can be associated to the individual crime observation instances, the occurrences follow regular patterns and seasonality. ...
Climate change is a global phenomenon that has been associated with a growing list of concerns in society today, often leaving more questions than answers. Thus, it is no surprise that questions are forming regarding the effects of climate change on global security, and more specifically, terrorism. India is the ideal case study for investigating the relationship between climate change and extremism, with average temperatures in the country reaching record highs as well as having 9,096 terrorist incidents occur during our 20-year study period between 1998 and 2017. Using daily temperature, precipitation, elevation, and distance to the equator data from the National Climatic Data Center and terrorist incidents from the Global Terrorism Data base (GTD), this study assesses the spatial relationship between these factors through geospatial analyses. Suitability analyses indicate that all the climatological variables tested—temperature, precipitation, and elevation—relate to shifting patterns of terrorist activity. We also found that beyond intensity, seasons result in a shifting of patterns in terrorist behavior to other locales. Implications for the global community and for India specifically are discussed.
... The studies looked at the impact of different perceived threats such as terrorism (Floyd et al., 2004;Rittichainuwat and Chakraborty, 2009;Sö nmez and Graefe, 1998), political instability (Sö nmez, 1998), natural disasters (Park and Reisinger, 2010), health risks (El-Ghitany et al., 2018), infectious diseases (Aro et al., 2009;Paudel et al., 2017) and the travelers' demographic characteristics like gender (Khan et al., 2019) or religious affiliation (He et al., 2013). Some of the studies addressed destination-specific risk perceptions (Drawve et al., 2020;Fuchs and Reichel, 2011;Gidebo, 2021;Lenggogeni et al., 2019;Yin et al., 2020), especially in the contexts of destination image or experience quality. ...
Purpose
This study aims to explore what may have contributed to risk-taking travel behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and what may be the drivers of satisfaction and intention to travel again. The study compares travelers based on their travel purposes (business, pleasure and visiting friends and relatives [VFR]) and explore the influence of subjective well-being received from their travel activities.
Design/methodology/approach
Data from a structured survey of 323 US residents who traveled during the COVID-19 pandemic were collected on MTurk. Respondents were asked travel behavior questions related to their favorite trips and to rate several multi-item scales measuring the benefits expected and received from their trip, the trip’s contribution to their positive mental and subjective psychological well-being, as well as their satisfaction with the trip and intention to travel in the future. In addition, personality measures focused on risk-taking, thrill-seeking and self-confidence, as well as additional risk-related concepts of optimism bias, probability neglect and proximity to self.
Findings
Data analysis revealed some differences among respondents who traveled for business, pleasure and VFR purposes. Business travelers were more risk takers and thrill seekers; pleasure travelers achieved more well-being benefits from their favorite trips during the pandemic; however, VFR travelers’ satisfaction and intention to go on similar trips were explained more by the benefits they received from their favorite trips.
Originality/value
Although several studies addressed consumers’ travel motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a lack of empirical research comparing the characteristics of travelers based on their travel purposes, as well as their sociodemographics, personality traits and the expected and perceived well-being benefits from traveling.
... It is typically committed by men against other men (Rennison & Melde, 2014), co-offending is common (Burrell, 2012;Smith, 2003;van Wilsem, 2009), and the majority of offenders are a stranger to the victim (86% in the year ending March 2020; ONS, 2020). Personal robbery is typically committed in public place (Rennison & Melde, 2014) but can cluster in certain types of places including the night-time economy (Haberman et al., 2013) and tourist attractions (Drawve et al., 2020). Violence is a key component of robbery and can be verbal or physical (Burrell, 2012). ...
The chapter will explain how robbery represents an overlap between theft and violence. There can be a lot of confusion about what robbery is (e.g. how this is different from snatch theft or burglary). Therefore, this chapter will outline what personal robbery is (e.g. legal definition) and is what it is not (e.g. we burgle houses and rob people). The difference between commercial versus personal robbery is provided for context. There will also be some discussion of how robbery is recorded. Recent statistics and other data relating to the prevalence of robbery and trends are included. The impact of robbery on victims (e.g. psychological, emotional, physical) and society is also explored. This chapter sets the context for the book.KeywordsPersonal robberyTheftBurglaryVictimisation
... With a few exceptions (Pelfrey, 1998;Pizam, 1982;Zhang & Xiang, 2021), research on relationship between tourism and crime finds that increased tourism leads to a rise in crime rates (Biagi et al., 2012;Montolio & Planells-Struse, 2016;Recher & Rubil, 2020Drawve et al., 2020, especially of offences committed against property (Mataković, 2020;Van Tram & Bridges, 2009). This positive and significant relationship between the number of visitors and crime rates has been explained mainly based on the routine activities theory of Cohen and Felson (1979). ...
Routine activities theory has been the most widely used framework to analyse the relationship between tourism and crime. But beyond crime opportunity, other ecological and structural factors may be present in this relationship. This article analyses whether high levels of tourist intensity are related to higher levels of urban crime in Barcelona (Spain) using the variables of social disorganization theory, that is, concentration of disadvantages, population turnover and ethnic-cultural heterogeneity. Under the hypothesis that the touristification of Barcelona neighbourhoods intensifies population turnover and enhances economical and ethnic-cultural heterogeneity in the area, it is expected that higher levels of tourism are related to higher rates of property and personal crime. To test this hypothesis and the mediating role of ecological variables, negative binomial fit models and simple mediation regression models are used. Findings suggest that higher levels of tourism are related to a higher volume of property and violent crimes in neighbourhoods and that this relationship is mediated by residential instability and national heterogeneity. However, mediation models suggest a negative relationship between tourism and crime when concentrated disadvantages are the mediator factor. The need to rethink the role of the socioeconomic variable in the relationship between crime and touristification is discussed.
... Figure 6 interestingly points out that the most exceptional enormous importance is January's month, contributing 23% of the remaining months, associated with the number of tourist hotspots in Bangladesh according to empirical outcomes. This result is partially comparable to current studies' results (Drawve et al., 2020;Islam, 2021). In summary, Bangladesh seems to be an attractive destination for tourists worldwide, forming the present findings and current related literature, where our research and study findings support that most relevant data and machine learning can improve growth hotspots analysis. ...
Awareness and access to information on travel benefits may bear importance for tourist preference in selecting popular destination. Tourism businesses are continuously exploring to improve their competitive advantage and offering an effective method for assisting tourist in electing their preferred destinations. However, current studies are still at an emergent stage. This paper presents a tourists preferences dataset and introduces preference pattern mining (PPM) method as a solution framework for discovering tourist spots. Our PPM method finds and validates the most active tourist hot spots from tourist preferences dataset. The proposed framework facilitates an unbiased approach for optimal tourism destination management in tourism-friendly countries.
... This could explain the diffusion of benefits realized in Atlantic City. The ACPD initiative significantly mitigated the city's growing robbery problem by suppressing these crimes to levels well-below what would normally be expected for the time period (Andresen & Malleson, 2013;Cohen et al., 2003;Drawve et al., 2020;McDowall et al., 2012;Szkola et al., 2021). These results confirm a successful intervention strategy that suppressed crime quickly by dynamically deploying resources to the places most in need of them. ...
... Data for Designating Target Areas. Hot spot mapping and risk terrain modeling (RTM) analyses were conducted by KCPD analysts using ArcGIS and RTMDx software , which has been used for similar purposes in several research studies across multiple jurisdictions (e.g., Caplan et al., 2015;Chillar & Drawve, 2020;Connealy & Piza et al., 2018;Drawve et al., 2020;Gim enez-Santana et al., 2018b;Szkola et al., 2019;Onat & Gul, 2018;Valasik, 2018;Yoo & Wheeler, 2019). KCPD analysts shared maps and other analytic outputs with patrol division commanders who selected target areas based on this intelligence. ...
The Kansas City, Missouri Police Department sought to reduce violent crime with an evidence-based approach to problem analysis and intervention planning. Informed by hot spot analysis and risk terrain modeling, police and their community partners implemented a place-based crime intervention program focused on key attractors and generators of the environmental backcloth. Target and comparison areas were selected for an outcome evaluation. During the 1-year program time period, violent crimes decreased significantly by over 22%. There was both a significant spatial diffusion of benefits and significantly fewer police officer-initiated actions resulting in arrests or citations. Crime prevention was achieved without an abundance of law enforcement actions against people located at the target areas. Implications for policy and practice are discussed within the contexts of police responses to urgent crime problems and data analytics.
... In the UK, for example, robbery is far more common in London than in other cities and most robberies occur in ten major conurbations (Burrows et al., 2003;Smith, 2003;Tilley et al., 2004). And evidence, from both the UK and USA, suggests that within cities it is concentrated in a small number of districts, including areas catering for the night-time economy (Haberman et al., 2013) and tourism centres (Drawve et al., 2020). Worldwide, moreover, victim survey data demonstrate that: ...
Discourses concerning risk have become increasingly popular among tourism academics. While these cover a wide range of safety and security concerns, there is rather less of a focus on risk from conventional crime than on terrorist threats. In contrast, criminologists have written extensively about the actual and perceived risk of crime. Both tourism academics and criminologists have addressed the question of who is most concerned about crime, but in each case this analysis has focused on questioning people at one point in time. This paper differs in that it compares the perceptions of risk of those arriving on a visit to Istanbul with perceptions of safety among a similar sample of those returning from their trip. In the former case, we consider tourists’ perceptions of risk prior to their arrival. In the latter case, their perceptions of safety after their trip, and the consequences of this for future visits, a key concern within the tourism industry.
This study looks at the spatial distribution of robbery against residents as a function of nonstationary density and mobility patterns in the most densely populated city in Spain, Barcelona. Based on the geographical coordinates of mobile devices, we computed two measures of density of the ambient population and the tourist presence, for work days, weekends, and holidays in 2019. Negative binomial regressions are then estimated to analyse whether these measures are correlated with the risk of robbery, controlling for land use and the characteristics of the social environment. The model reveals that residents’ chances of being exposed to robbery in Barcelona depend on the social relevance and tourism attractiveness of certain places at particular times of the year. Our results disclose two sources of social disorganization as stronger predictors of the occurrence of robbery in Barcelona, respectively linked to structural processes of residential instability and daily and seasonal mobility patterns. On the one hand, we found that the effect of the density of international tourists on the outcome variable is mediated by residential volatility, which is assumed to be associated with housing shortages in neighbourhoods where short-term vacation rentals are widespread. On the other hand, the ability to exert effective social control is significantly undermined in urban areas, where the ambient population and the volume of tourists outnumber the resident population, thus increasing incidents of robbery victimization. The implications of these findings for urban policy and crime prevention in the Catalan capital are discussed.
There are some tools in place that classifies and/or rank beaches according to a series of parameters. It is possible to identify a gap in the development of tools that map and describe beaches without putting the results into a classification status of good or bad. Since beaches are important from different points of views such as ecology, tourism, economy, pollution or invasive species studies and management, fisheries, estate development, protected areas, among others it is relevant to describe and understand parameters in detail. This work offers a multi-purpose and interactive beach descriptor called BeachLog. It can be used by beachgoers to keep their own records in the same way a diver uses a Diver's LogBook, managers can use the tool to support coastal management projects, long-term monitoring, and beach description baseline. Also, BeachLog can be a didactic tool to aiming to bring environmental sciences closer to technology through the use of spreadsheets and dashboards. BeachLog is based on the more frequent parameters in the literature, selected, organized, accounted for, and altered/added according to expert opinion. We created a list of 28 parameters, all of which were described in details of what is expected to be observed by the user. They were divided into 5 groups (Environmental characteristics, Services & Infrastructure, Information & Security, Planning & Management, and Descriptive). Here, we describe 14 Brazilian beaches using the BeachLog by inputting the results as parameters presence or absence (0/1) and descriptives in a table that can be transformed into an interactive dashboard for better/easier visualization. Planning & Management was absent on all 14 beaches studied, pointing out the relevance and gaps in this group. In the other groups it was possible to observe variation in the parameter occurrence, indicating that each beach is different and it is important to observe parameters individually. Beach Litter and Invasive Species parameters from the Environmental characteristics group were present in all beaches. BeachLog showed as an easy way to describe a beach and can be a tool to support diagnosis and understanding of the beach's status.
In the travel industry, safety and security are imperative and any attraction sites which ignore these tasks stand to lose out on the intense competition for tourists. One way to ensure that safety and security are satisfactorily provided is to regularly assess and seek the perceptions of stakeholders. Studies that make such an attempt, particularly in a Nigerian Geopark are relatively underrepresented in the literature. This study therefore evaluates safety and security situations at a large geopark and one of the most visited tourist destinations in Nigeria. Through direct observation, an on-site assessment of safety and security measures was undertaken by experts. The assessment instrument was designed using an empirical adaptation of standards which have been suggested in the literature. In addition, members of the site management were interviewed on various outcomes of the field study. Generally, the safety and security architecture in the study area appeared to be insufficient as the management seemed restrained to be too proactive for fear of scaring wildlife and visitors. Besides, the management did not consider the site to be under any serious threat as no major accident and/or crime has been recorded in the last decade. The study concludes that safety and security approaches in the study area do not reflect standard measures but rather cautious approach and an overly dependence on a supposed good past record. The result of this study can facilitate standard practice for safety and security in tourist destinations. This study fills the knowledge gap by providing information on the Nigerian experience regarding safety and security of Geopark in the Global South.
This study looks at the spatial distribution of robbery against residents as a function of non-stationary density and mobility patterns in the most densely populated city in Spain, Barcelona. Based on the geographical coordinates of mobile devices, we computed two measures of density of the ambient population and the tourist presence, for work days, weekends, and holidays in 2019. Negative binomial regressions are then estimated to analyse whether these measures are correlated with the risk of robbery, controlling for land use and the characteristics of the social environment. The model reveals that residents' chances of being exposed to robbery in Barcelona depend on the social relevance and tourism attractiveness of certain places at particular times of the year. Our results disclose two sources of social disorganization as stronger predictors of the occurrence of robbery in Barcelona, respectively linked to structural processes of residential instability and daily and seasonal mobility patterns. On the one hand, we found that the effect of the density of international tourists on the outcome variable is mediated by residential volatility, which is assumed to be associated with housing shortages in neighbourhoods where short-term vacation rentals are widespread. On the other hand, the ability to exert effective social control is significantly undermined in urban areas, where the ambient population and the volume of tourists outnumber the resident population, thus increasing incidents of robbery victimization. The implications of these findings for urban policy and crime prevention in the Catalan capital are discussed.
The issue of crime risk associated with travel has been receiving increased attention, yet this has scarcely been studied in African contexts. Besides, how travel intention is influenced by the interactions of perceived crime risk and socioeconomic characteristics has scarcely been investigated. This study examines whether perceived crime-risk factors and socioeconomic characteristics help to explain future travel intentions to megacities using Lagos, Nigeria as a case study. Self-administered questionnaires were used to gather information from a sample of travellers who arrived in Lagos in 2019. Frequency counts, percentages, mean and Ordinary Least Squares Regression (OLS) were used to analyse and interpret the data. The findings show that respondents were not certain about their safety in Lagos. Likewise, they were uncertain about their future travel to the city. Though partially mediated by travellers' socioeconomic characteristics, the findings show that perceived crime risk significantly predicts future travel intentions. Implications of these findings to travel and security management are discussed.
This chapter focuses on offence behaviours and methods of committing personal robbery. This includes target selection, types of approach used (e.g. blitz, con), property stolen, and weapon display and use. Offender adaptation and overlaps with other offences are considered—e.g. a car thief who now needs the key to steal a car might escalate to robbery to achieve the theft.
The Atlantic City Police Department intervened to reduce robberies with an evidence-based approach. Informed by risk terrain modeling and hot spot analysis, police commanders implemented a place-based intervention focused around convenience stores. Target areas throughout the city were reprioritized each month to create a dynamic deployment strategy that efficiently allocated resources to the most vulnerable places. Risk reduction actions, such as business checks, were favored over law enforcement against people. Robberies significantly decreased by over 37% within four months. There was a significant spatial diffusion of benefits and there were fewer arrests, as should be expected with fewer crimes and a tactical place-based, not person-oriented, approach. Implications for policy and practice are discussed within the contexts of rapid evidence-based police responses to urgent crime problems, police culture, and data analytics.
This study examines temporal variations in the spatial influence of environmental features, such as bars and vacant buildings on criminal behavior across micro-level places. Specifically, 17 environmental risk factors and their spatial influences are identified for calendar year 2014 street robberies in Jersey City, New Jersey. To explore temporal variation, risk factors and their spatial influences on crime are identified across 12 discrete 2-hour time intervals. The results demonstrate that the risk factors for street robbery varied across the course of a day. In fact, mapping the most vulnerable places for street robbery revealed that while many of the same environmental features remain high risk throughout the day, their influence varied. These results suggested that there was a temporality to robbery and that it is likely due to the interaction between physical vulnerabilities from the built environment and social behaviors of people at these places. This demonstrates the importance of considering the temporal dimension of criminal behavior as results show that people use and interact with their environment differently throughout the course of the day
Objectives
This paper offers novel experimental evidence that violent crimes can be successfully reduced by changing the situational environment that potential victims and offenders face. We focus on a ubiquitous but understudied feature of the urban landscape—street lighting—and report the first experimental evidence on the effect of street lighting on crime.
Methods
Through a unique public partnership in New York City, temporary street lights were randomly allocated to 40 of the city’s public housing developments.
Results
We find evidence that communities that were assigned more lighting experienced sizable reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes. We also observe a large decline in arrests indicating that deterrence is the most likely mechanism through which the intervention reduced crime.
Conclusion
Results suggests that street lighting, when deployed tactically, may be a means through which policymakers can control crime without widening the net of the criminal justice system.
This paper explores Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space (1972) concept of geographical juxtaposition (GJ) highlighting a significant lack of research within the criminological literature over the last 50 years. We argue the concept is a key foundation in understanding crime and crime prevention theories and in developing crime prevention strategies. Findings from a systematic review of the literature are presented to illustrate the paucity of research into geographical juxtaposition. We develop and extend the concept of geographical juxtaposition beyond that originally coined by Newman to include all immediate, local, distant, and remote environmental (physical) factors. Additionally, we demonstrate, by reference to practical criminological situations, the significant and extensive role of our revised concept of geographical juxtaposition. In particular, we point to the way that focusing on geographical juxtaposition identifies serious problems in many taken-for-granted assumptions in planning theory and practice. In exploring the concept of geographical juxtaposition, we highlight ten ways it can affect crime risks and six ways using geographical juxtaposition can benefit efforts to apply crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) more successfully when conducting a crime risk assessment. Finally, this paper briefly discusses four new CPTED principles, which emerge from our exploration of geographical juxtaposition. We identify new classes of CPTED methods and new ways of analyzing crime and offer the basis for new criminological theories.
Objectives
This updated systematic review assesses the effects of focused police crime prevention interventions at crime hot spots. The review also examined whether focused police actions at specific locations result in crime displacement or diffusion of crime control benefits.
Methods
Systematic review protocols and conventions of the Campbell Collaboration were followed to identify eligible hot spots policing studies, and meta-analytic techniques were used to assess the impact of hot spots policing on crime and investigate the influence of moderating variables.
Results
The search strategies identified 65 studies containing 78 tests of hot spots policing interventions. Meta-analyses revealed a small statistically significant mean effect size favoring the effects of hot spots policing in reducing crime outcomes at treatment places relative to control places. Crime displacement and diffusion effects were measured in 40 tests. Meta-analyses favored a small statistically significant diffusion of crime control benefits over displacement.
Conclusion
The extant evaluation research provides fairly robust evidence that hot spots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy. Focused police intervention at hot spot locations does not seem to result in the spatial displacement of crime into areas immediately surrounding targeted locations. Rather, crime control benefits seem to diffuse into proximate areas.
Crime pattern theory claims that busy places generate crime through immediate and delayed exploitation. In delayed exploitation, offenders notice criminal opportunities during opening hours but return to exploit them later. This study investigates delayed exploitation by testing whether soccer stadiums locally increase police recorded property crime on non-game days. A soccer stadium closure created a natural experiment. We estimate linear regression difference-in-difference models to compare crime rates on non-game days around the stadium, before and after the closure. The closure reduced non-game day property crime beyond the citywide property crime drop. We conclude that criminogenic effects of busy places extend beyond their opening hours, confirming the delayed exploitation mechanism, and that crime prevention strategies should also target these places outside opening hours.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to respond to the need for comparative studies on methodologies for implementing Crime Prevention through Urban Design and Planning (CP-UDP) at the local level, particularly in peripheral Europe where CP-UDP’s top-down standards have poor dissemination and acceptance. This paper debates how local partnerships can help reduce crime and how a CP-UDP-based model can be introduced into municipal planning.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper discusses the challenge of CP-UDP in the framework of a post-crisis Europe and Europe 2020. Because there is a large gap between theory and practice, lack of a shared holistic approach, and scepticism, or lack of knowledge, of public authorities, at local-level planning professionals and the police have devised bottom-up initiatives based on interdisciplinary partnerships with the community. The paper describes, discusses and compares the implementation of such approaches in Lisbon (Portugal) and Vilnius (Lithuania).
Findings
The paper addresses the processes and challenges of establishing synergies and working relationships between police officers, public officials and the community, and it discusses six main causes for its (un)success. When these conditions were met, crime and social constraints reduced.
Practical implications
Lessons learned are deemed crucial to disseminate knowledge and best practices, paving the way for proper top-down policies and planning legislations in these and other countries.
Originality/value
This paper analyses the potentialities and shortcomings of local-level implementation of CP-UDP strategies as an alternative to failed top-down strategies in two realities mostly unknown of the international scientific community. The case study material is previously unpublished internationally.
This article questions the police capacity to apply all the evidence about the link between crimes and places. It reviews
what we know about crime places in six propositions. Most policing strategies are unable to take advantage of all six propositions.
Particular attention is drawn to place managers. Managers have the ability to address the factors that make places attractive
for crime or resistant to crime. Evidence suggests a regulatory approach to place management is more productive than a hot
spot enforcement approach. Most police agencies may not be willing or capable of applying a regulatory approach. Thus, it
might be advisable to create a new non-police agency to prevent crime at places. Not only might this be more effective, it
may also be less expensive and create fewer difficulties with communities.
Smart tourism is a new buzzword applied to describe the increasing reliance of tourism destinations, their industries and their tourists on emerging forms of ICT that allow for massive amounts of data to be transformed into value propositions. However, it remains ill-defined as a concept , which hinders its theoretical development. The paper defines smart tourism, sheds light on current smart tourism trends, and then lays out its technological and business foundations. This is followed by a brief discussion on the prospects and drawbacks of smart tourism. The paper further draws attention to the great need for research to inform smart tourism development and management.
Objectives: Inspired by ecological theories of crime, the aim of this study was to make use of a natural experiment to see if a U.K. soccer stadium generates or attracts crime in the area that surrounds it. Method: Data for theft and violent crime around Wembley stadium are analyzed to see if the rate (per-unit time and ambient population) of crime differ for days on which the stadium is used and those it is not. In addition, differences in the spatial and temporal distribution of crime are examined for these two types of days. Results: Analyses indicate that on days when the stadium is used, the rate of crime per-unit time is elevated, but that the rate per ambient population at risk is not. The spatial and temporal pattern of crime also clearly differs for the two types of days. For example, the level of crime is elevated in the surrounding area when the stadium is used relative to when it is not. Conclusions. The case study suggests that the facility studied contributes to levels of crime in the area that surrounds it. The research provides further support for ecological theories of crime and their utility in informing criminological understanding and policy-related questions.
There are numerous hot spot mapping techniques that can be used in research and in practice for predicting future crime locations. Due to differences in the varying techniques, metrics were developed to compare the accuracy and precision of these techniques. The predictive accuracy index (PAI) and recapture rate index (RRI) were used to assess six different hot spot techniques. Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Crime, Nearest Neighbor Hierarchical, Kernel Density Estimation, and Risk Terrain Modeling were the general techniques compared in relation to their PAI and RRI values for short-term and long-term prediction of robberies. The results of the study were discussed with an emphasis on the utility of using multiple techniques jointly for analysis.
The emergence of Web 2.0 in recent years has significantly affected tourism information sources. This paper attempts to confirm how Travel 2.0 applications have influenced tourist decision-making behaviour. The results of the study show that tourists continue to be influenced to a greater extent by the comments and opinions of friends and relatives (word-of-mouth, WOM) when arranging travel than by other Internet users (eWOM). The study demonstrates that official travel destination websites are the most widely used online platform among tourists seeking information, followed by travel blogs and travel social network sites. Finally, different groups of tourists are classified according to their socio-demographic characteristics to explain the degree to which these information sources influence travel decisions.
To date, limited research has investigated the effects of tourist prior knowledge as a multidimensional construct on their perceived risk. This research is one of the first studies to investigate the relationships among tourists’ risk perceptions and various types of their prior knowledge, namely subjective knowledge, objective knowledge, prior visitation, and past international travel experience. The research also investigates the nature of the relationship between tourist prior knowledge, risk perceptions, and their subsequent information search behavior. Using structural equation modeling, the results reveal that while objective knowledge did not significantly reduce or increase the risk associated with traveling to the Middle East, subjective knowledge appeared to have the strongest influence on tourist risk perceptions. The results of this study further suggest that while various dimensions of perceived risk may elicit the use of different information sources, prior knowledge also plays a role alongside risk perceptions in determining the information sources used. Implications at both theoretical and practical levels are also discussed.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to establish the progress of information and communication technology (ICT) based on a review of papers published in tourism and hospitality journals between 2009 and 2013.
Design/methodology/approach
– Based on three major databases, 107 journal papers were retrieved and reviewed. The papers were grouped into two major categories, consumer and supplier, which generally comprise the key players in the industries.
Findings
– A content analysis showed that hospitality and tourism industries use ICT in different functional units and for different applications. This, in turn, indicates their wide adoption in the industry. Industrial implications are discussed.
Practical implications
– On the basis of the content analysis, industry practitioners can learn about up-to-date practices and decide how to take advantage of recent technological developments.
Originality/value
– A major contribution of this paper is the comprehensive review of recently published papers in tourism and hospitality journals from the perspectives of consumer and supplier.
Background
When analytical techniques are used to understand and analyse geographical events, adjustments to the datasets (e.g. aggregation, zoning, segmentation etc.) in both the spatial and temporal dimensions are often carried out for various reasons. The ‘Modifiable Areal Unit Problem’ (MAUP), which is a consequence of adjustments in the spatial dimension, has been widely researched. However, its temporal counterpart is generally ignored, especially in space-time analysis.
Methods
In analogy to MAUP, the Modifiable Temporal Unit Problem (MTUP) is defined as consisting of three temporal effects (aggregation, segmentation and boundary). The effects of MTUP on the detection of space-time clusters of crime datasets of Central London are examined using Space-Time Scan Statistics (STSS).
Results and Conclusion
The case study reveals that MTUP has significant effects on the space-time clusters detected. The attributes of the clusters, i.e. temporal duration, spatial extent (size) and significance value (p-value), vary as the aggregation, segmentation and boundaries of the datasets change. Aggregation could be used to find the significant clusters much more quickly than at lower scales; segmentation could be used to understand the cyclic patterns of crime types. The consistencies of the clusters appearing at different temporal scales could help in identifying strong or ‘true’ clusters.
Purpose ‐ This paper aims to evaluate a problem-oriented policing project that used regulatory policy to foster responsible place management among operators of nuisance motels located in Southern California. Design/methodology/approach ‐ A mixed-methodological approach was used to ensure that a comprehensive assessment captured substantive outcomes, as well as implementation issues and displacement effects. Findings ‐ Each component of the initiative generated some success, with the greatest crime reduction achieved when all motels were in full compliance with the permit-to-operate ordinance. Consistency in key project staff was critical to maintaining program integrity. Research limitations/implications ‐ The displacement analysis suggests that crime prevention evaluations would benefit from a facilities orientation that identifies locations that might host crime if the targeted sites are rendered inopportune. And, net effects can be applied to facilities research using standardized crime rates. Practical implications ‐ Ends-based regulatory policy offers law enforcement an alternative to conventional crime control strategies. Responsibility for crime prevention can be shifted to place managers to reduce the incidents of crime and disorder (reported and unreported to police). Ancillary benefits include better city-industry communication and more efficient use of city resources. Originality/value ‐ This research is valuable to police agencies considering the use of ordinances to address crime and disorder problems plaguing risky facilities.
Objectives
Use crime pattern theory to investigate the proximity effects of public housing communities on robbery crime while taking into account the presence of nearby nonresidential facilities.
Method
The study uses data describing 41 Philadelphia public housing communities and their surrounds. Surrounds are defined using two increments of street block-sized buffers. Multilevel models (buffer areas nested around public housing communities) allowing the proximity effect to vary across communities and predicting its shape with public housing level predictors are estimated.
Results
The multilevel models show that the shape of proximity effects varies across public housing communities and depends on community size, even after factoring in presence of nonresidential facilities. Spatially, multiple public housing communities close to one another have more intense robbery patterns.
Conclusions
Labeling all public housing communities as equally criminogenic robbery exporters is unwarranted. In fact, some communities have lower robbery counts than the areas surrounding them. Consequently, effectively addressing robbery in and around public housing communities will require careful consideration of where the problem is located. Locating public housing communities more than two blocks apart may reduce robbery.
Seasonal crime patterns have been a topic of sustained criminological research for more than a century. Results in the area are often conflicting, however, and no firm consensus exists on many points. The current study uses a long time series and a large areal sample to obtain more detailed seasonality estimates than have been available in the past. The findings show that all major crime rates exhibit seasonal behavior, and that most follow similar cycles. The existence of seasonal patterns is not explainable by monthly temperature differences between areas, but seasonality and temperature variations do interact with each other. These findings imply that seasonal fluctuations have both environmental and social components, which can combine to create different patterns from one location to another.
The relative contribution of tourism to nine various types of crimes throughout the 50 states of the U.S. is examined for the year of 1975. Nine regression models, each one involving a different type of crime, analyzed the relative contribution of tourism alongside nine other sociodemographic predictors. The results indicate that for five out of nine crimes tourism was not found to be a determinant at all. For the remaining four the magnitude of contribution was so low that it could be considered insubstantial.
Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain why some bars generate more crime than others. Using data gathered from bars in Cincinnati, Ohio, we find little support for the hypothesis that high crime bars are simply the product of high crime neighborhoods. To explain the unequal distribution of violence across drinking establishments, we propose a model that recognizes crime as an outcome of place manager decision-making. This model explains how managers create environments that suppress or facilitate violence through business-related choices. Implications of the model for understanding crime distributions, conducting future research, and extending current theoretical frameworks are discussed.
In this paper we present a "routine activity approach" for analyzing crime rate trends and cycles. Rather than emphasizing the characteristics of offenders, with this approach we concentrate upon the circumstances in which they carry out predatory criminal acts. Most criminal acts require convergence in space and time of likely offenders, suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians against crime. Human ecological theory facilitates an investigation into the way in which social structure produces this convergence, hence allowing illegal activities to feed upon the legal activities of everyday life. In particular, we hypothesize that the dispersion of activities away from households and families increases the opportunity for crime and thus generates higher crime rates. A variety of data is presented in support of the hypothesis, which helps explain crime rate trends in the United States 1947-1974 as a byproduct of changes in such variables as labor force participation and single-adult households.
On his first full day in office, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government calling on his administration to develop recommendations that would “establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration.” Together, the recommendations would be used to create an “Open Government Directive” instructing agencies to transform themselves to become more transparent, collaborative, and participatory. The President also issued a Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These statements did not spring ex nihilo from President Obama and his aides (or even from the army of organizations and individuals who advised them or submitted recommendations during the transition). They have a basis in extant law and regulation, and it this basis at which this article looks.
Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about the impacts of local nonresidential land uses on perceived incivilities. This study advances work in this area by developing a land-use perspective theoretically grounded in Brantingham and Brantingham's geometry of crime model in environmental criminology. That focus directs attention to specific classes of land uses and suggests relevance of land uses beyond and within respondents' neighborhoods. Extrapolating from victimization and reactions to crime, crime-generating and crime-attracting land uses are expected to increase perceived neighborhood incivilities and crime. Multilevel models using land use, crime, census, and survey data from 342 Philadelphia heads of households confirmed expected individual-level impacts. These persisted even after controlling for resident demographics and for neighborhood fabric and violent crime rates. Neighborhood status and crime were the only relevant ecological predictors, and their impacts are interpreted in light of competing perspectives on the origins of incivilities.
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 more than 60,000 separate parcels of land in a large British Columbia city. Specific land-use types that concentrate routine human activities in time and space are found to act as major crime generators and attractors. Attention to the distribution of these land-use types across the urban mosaic can substantially reduce the volume of crime associated with design decisions.
The growth of intelligence-led policing has placed even greater emphasis on the clear iden-tification of crime hotspots as well as the choice of the crime reduction or detection strategy identified to combat a problem. Crime hotspots are becoming central to policing strategy in many locations, as they enable an operational commander to focus resources into the areas of highest need. This paper outlines the techniques used to identify the spatial and temporal components of crime hotspots, and utilizes these methods to identify three broad categories of temporal hotspot and three broad categories of spatial hotspot. These categories are described in the form of a Hotspot Matrix. Real examples show how the spatial and tempo-ral characteristics combine within the hotspot matrix, and the paper concludes by showing how operational commanders and crime prevention practitioners might employ the hotspot matrix to determine an appropriate prevention or detection strategy.
Reliable estimates of crime seasonality are valuable for law enforcement and crime prevention.
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 neutral areas - those where crimes are more haphazardly dispersed. Further, a review of the literature has revealed a lack of research in determining the relative strength of attraction that different types of activity nodes possess based on characteristics of criminal events in their immediate surrounds. In this paper we use offenders' home locations and the locations of their crimes to define directional and distance parameters. Using these parameters we apply mathematical structures to define rules by which different models may behave to investigate the influence of activity nodes on the spatial distribution of crimes in crime neutral areas. The findings suggest an increasing likelihood of crime as a function of geometric angle and distance from an offender's home location to the site of the criminal event. Implications of the results are discussed.
The present study uses Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) to analyze how nine different alcohol outlet types differentially influence the likelihood of aggravated assault and street robbery at micro-level places in New York City. Separate models were conducted for each of New York’s five boroughs to account for the differing environmental characteristics across the city. Results suggest that spatial influence of crime risk differed across alcohol outlet types, with off-premise grocery stores having the largest influence on the likelihood of both aggravated assault and street robbery and on-premise bars/taverns having a strong influence only on the likelihood of street robbery. In addition, although certain alcohol outlets affected crime in each borough, the spatial influence of others was more volatile. It is clear not all alcohol outlet types are equally criminogenic across boroughs. Thus, crime reduction efforts should be unique and localized according to the risk associated with outlet types and place.
Research identifies various place features (e.g., bars, schools, public transportation stops) that generate or attract crime. What is less clear is how the spatial influence of these place features compares across relatively similar environments, even for the same crime. In this study, risk terrain modeling (RTM), a geospatial crime forecasting and diagnostic tool, is utilized to identify place features that increase the risk of robbery and their particular spatial influence in Chicago, Illinois; Newark, New Jersey; and Kansas City, Missouri. The results show that the risk factors for robbery are similar between environments, but not necessarily identical. Further, some factors were riskier for robbery and affected their surrounding landscape in different ways that others. Consistent with crime pattern theory, the results suggest that the broader organization of the environmental backcloth affects how constituent place features relate to and influence crime. Implications are discussed with regard to research and practice.
In this article, we demonstrate the potential value that the spatial and semantic analysis of social media messages can provide to smart tourism ecosystems. Building upon a showcase of 600,000 Twitter messages in San Francisco, we illustrate insights for stakeholders within the tourism sector from various analyses, including kernel density estimation and latent Dirichlet allocation. We show that social media analytics captures spatial patterns within the city that relate to the presence of users and the environmental and topical engagement. Furthermore, we outline how these patterns serve as an input to value creation for smart urban tourism.
The use of smart tourism technologies such as travel-related websites, social media, and smartphones in travel planning has been pervasive and growing. This study examines the mechanism of how travelers use these technologies to enhance travel satisfaction. By adopting the framework of exploration and exploitation and identifying the antecedents that advance and prohibit such uses, we find that the attributes of smart tourism technologies promote both explorative and exploitative use, while user’s security and privacy concerns have a negative effect. In addition, explorative use has a strong influence on overall travel experience satisfaction, and exploitative use mainly enhances the transaction satisfaction.
Purpose: Crime analysts need accurate population-at-risk measures to quantify crime rates. This research evaluates five measures to find the most suitable ambient population-at-risk estimate for 'theft from the person' crimes. Method: 1.Collect 'ambient' datasets: the 2011 Census, aggregate mobile telephone locations, and social media.2.Correlate the population measures against crime volumes to identify the strongest predictor.3.Use the Gi* statistic to identify statistically significant clusters of crime under alternative denominators.4.Explore the locations of clusters, comparing those that are significant under ambient and residential population estimates. Results and Discussion: The research identifies the Census workday population as the most appropriate population-at-risk measure. It also highlights areas that exhibit statistically significant rates using both the ambient and residential denominators. This hints at an environmental backcloth that is indicative of both crime generators and attractors - i.e. places that attract large numbers of people for non-crime purposes (generators) as well as places that are used specifically for criminal activity (attractors). Regions that are largely residential and yet only exhibit hotspots under the ambient population might be places with a higher proportion of crime attractors to stimulate crime, but fewer generators to attract volumes of people.
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 movement to demonstrate how directionality is embedded in city infrastructures. Visually presenting the interplay between these criminological concepts and land use can improve police crime management strategies. This research presents how this crime mapping technique can be applied to a major roadway in Burnaby, Canada. This technique is contrasted with other crime mapping methods to demonstrate the utility of this approach when analyzing the rate and velocity of crime patterns overtime and in space.
Prior research has applied risk assessment and spatial analysis techniques to the study of violence. This paper builds on those results, tying the practical outcomes of spatial risk analysis methods to broader spatial issues on the articulation of risky places for aggravated assault. We begin by conceptualizing key relationships, addressing the effects of environmental factors on creating distinct, identifiable areas that are conducive to crime. Propositions of the theory of risky places are posed and then empirically tested using a GIS based program, RTMDx, on aggravated assault data in an urban area. Given the current thinking about crime vulnerability based on concentration and spatial influence of features and events, this paper offers an analytical strategy to model risky places that combines the conceptual insights of crime emergence and persistence, advances in geo-spatial analytical techniques, and micro-level data.
In this paper we examine the effects of alcohol outlets, with particular attention to convenience stores, located in an East Coast Tourist City. Tourist City offered an opportunity to observe the interplay between convenience stores and robberies and assaults in the presence of large volumes of summer tourists. Guided by Routine Activities Theory, we focused on the convergence of potential victims, guardianship and offenders in the vicinity of convenience stores. The first part of our paper concerns the effects of convenience stores on assaults and robberies in block groups. Using grocery stores as a comparison to convenience stores, we found that the number of convenience stores was correlated with significantly higher levels of both robberies and assaults. The second part of our investigation employed small circular buffer areas focusing on the immediate area around the convenience stores. This analysis revealed that these small areas were associated with significantly higher assaults in the summer and offseason but robberies only during the offseason. In addition, we found that variation in the number of other alcohol outlets near the convenience stores increases the number of assaults within the buffer areas.
Objectives
Test whether the exposure of street segments to five different potentially criminogenic facilities is positively related to violent, property, or disorder crime counts controlling for sociodemographic context. The geographic extent of the relationship is also explored.
Method
Facility exposure is operationalized as total inverse distance from each street segment in Philadelphia, PA, to surrounding facilities within three threshold distances of 400, 800, and 1,200 feet. All distances are measured using shortest path street distance. Census block group data representing ethnic heterogeneity, concentrated disadvantage, and stability are proportionally allocated to each street block. Negative binomial regression is used to model the relationships.
Results
Exposure to bars and subway stations was positively associated with violent, property, and disorder crime at all distance thresholds from street segments. Schools were associated with disorder offenses at all distance thresholds. The effects of exposure to halfway houses and drug treatment centers varied by distance and by crime type.
Conclusions
Facilities have a significant effect on crime at nearby places even controlling for sociodemographic variables. The geographic extent of a facility’s criminogenic influence varies by type of facility and type of crime. Future research should examine additional types of facilities and include information about place management.
This study examined 2009 to 2011 street robbery patterns in Philadelphia, PA USA in order to determine if the effects of potentially criminogenic places are different across different periods of the day. Census block (N = 13,164) street robbery counts across four periods (06:45 AM to 09:59 AM, 10:00 AM to 04:29 PM, 04:30 PM to 09:14 PM, and 09:15 PM to 06:44 AM) were modeled with twelve different potentially criminogenic places, three measures of illicit markets, four compositional control variables, and spatially lagged versions of the twelve potentially criminogenic places and population using simultaneously estimated negative binomial regression models. Differences in the magnitudes of the parameter estimates across the time periods were assessed using Wald tests. Overall, the significance patterns across the four models were mostly consistent with the effects hypothesized based on the study’s crime pattern theory and time geography theoretical frame, yet differences in the magnitudes of the coefficients were less pronounced than hypothesized. Overall, the results provide moderate support for the crime pattern theory and time geography explanation of spatial-temporal robbery patterns, yet raise numerous points for future crime and place research.
Specialist tourist police units are a recent development in many countries where tourism is important to the economy and where crimes associated with tourism are recognised. However, such developments are scarcely universal. This paper focuses on three contrasting examples: the UK, where there are no specialist tourist police, despite a clear relationship between tourism and crime and disorder; Ghana, where tourist police have been introduced relatively recently; and the USA, where tourist police units are an established part of policing structures in tourist areas like Florida. After describing the current situation in each area, the paper concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of specialist units and the reasons why contrasting policies have emerged.
The effects of crime generators, crime attractors, and offender anchor points on the distribution of street robberies across the nearly 25,000 census blocks of Chicago are examined. The analysis includes a wide array of activities and facilities that are expected to attract criminals and generate crime. These include a variety of legal and illegal businesses and infrastructural accessibility facilitators. In addition to these crime attractors and generators, the role of the presence of motivated offenders’ anchor points, as measured by offenders’ residence and gang activity, is assessed. The analysis also includes crime attractors, crime generators, and offender anchor points in adjacent census blocks. The findings demonstrate the strength of the effects of crime generators and attractors and offender anchor points on the frequency of street robbery at the census block level.
Violent crime incidents occurring in Irvington, New Jersey, in 2007 and 2008 are used to assess the joint analytical capabilities of point pattern analysis, hotspot mapping, near-repeat analysis, and risk terrain modeling. One approach to crime analysis suggests that the best way to predict future crime occurrence is to use past behavior, such as actual incidents or collections of incidents, as indicators of future behavior. An alternative approach is to consider the environment in which crimes occur and identify features of the landscape that would be conducive to crime. Thanks to advances in geographic information system technology and federally funded (free) software applications such as CrimeStat III or the Near Repeat Calculator, these methods have recently been made more accessible to “average” users. This study explores the information products that each method offers for the purposes of place-based violent crime forecasting and resource allocation. Findings help to answer questions about where, when, and why violent crimes occur in a jurisdiction. Ways in which event-dependent and environmental crime analysis techniques can be utilized as complementary instruments in a crime analyst’s tool kit are discussed in detail.
This article uses an alternative measure of the population at risk, the ambient population (provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratory), in crime rate calculations. It is shown through a variety of statistical analyses at two different scales of aggregation that this alternatively calculated crime rate is not always related to the conventionally calculated crime rate. The implications of this finding are that past theoretical testing and policy formation might have been based on spurious results, showing the importance of remaining current with the developments of geographic information science technologies and data availability when undertaking a spatial analysis of crime.
It has been known for some time that crime risk is unevenly distributed and that some geographic areas experience more crime than others. However, less attention has been given to the ebb and flow of crime hotspots and in particular the stability of crime problems. This is important as the identification of appropriate crime reduction responses should be informed by the timing and stability of crime problems as well as their location. This paper reviews recent work concerned with space-time patterns of crime and the implications of the findings for crime forecasting. Variation in the stability of crime hotspots is discussed in some detail and an empirical demonstration provided to illustrate the central issues. A modification of a current hotspotting method that may better identify stable hotspots of crime is also presented. Findings are discussed in relation to their policy implications including those that focus on the built environment.
Using Cleveland data, we replicate Roncek and LoBosco's study of the effect of proximity to San Diego's high schools on crime in their surroundings. We also examine a major alternative hypothesis whether having other non-residential land uses in the schools’ surroundings accounts for crime in these areas. Our findings closely parallel theirs. Proximity to public high schools only increases crime on city blocks which are immediately adjacent to the schools. Second, the size of a school's enrollment is not important for explaining crime in its surroundings. The analysis of non-residential effects supports Roncek and LoBosco's claim that crime effects are due solely to the presence of public high schools, although other land uses affect crime near private high schools. While there are differences in the exact magnitudes of the effects, the substance of their findings for San Diego generalizes well to a very different city. More generally, we argue that Wirth's early arguments about the effect of urbanism on impeding social control can be extended to the residential areas within the city.
Tourists and visitors represent a valuable and appreciated element of many countries and many communities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these tourists and visitors are at great risk of being victims of violent and property crimes in the cities they visit. This paper assesses the relationship between the number of visitors to various cities and the types and patterns of crimes, over time, in two cities engaged in mass tourism. If the anecdotal re- ports are valid indications, crime should fluctuate directly in proportion to the number of visitors. If other factors have stronger explanatory power, the relationship between tourists (visitors) and crime will not be strong or consistent. Based on the data, this research showed that the number of tourists over the course of an eleven year period does not adequately explain the variations in violent crime rates of either of the two cities. Violent crime rates in Honolulu and Las Vegas from 1982 through 1993 showed less of an increase than the increases experienced by other similar cities in the United States for the period studied. The data showed that there was no significant correlation between any of the four serious violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) and the number of visi- tors to Las Vegas. For Honolulu, there was an inverse relationship between the number of visitors and the violent crimes of murder and robbery but a direct and significant relation- ship to aggravated assault. The results could assist these and other cities in studying more idiosyncratically the relationship between crime and tourism as well as the localization of crimes on visitors in order to engage in measurement and prevention efforts which would serve visitors as well as residents.
This study reviews the general literature on tourism and crime and the recent history of violent and property crime in several Caribbean destinations. It highlights the failure of most previous research to discriminate crimes against tourists vs. residents. Annual crime data for Barbados for 1989–93 are analyzed and reveal that overall guest victimization rates are higher than host rates. Residents are significantly more likely to be victimized by violent crime while tourists are significantly more likely to experience property crime and robbery. Monthly data on guest victimization for 1990–93 show similar patterns. The paper concludes with a number of measures to enhance tourist safety.
Tourists can become adversely affected by the law of a country they visit. The host may commit a crime against the visiting tourist. Conversely, the tourist may commit a crime against the host. A third and interrelated issue concerns the attitude and actions of the host country's legal institutions toward tourists — giving rise to the title of this paper. These issues are explored through information collected during several studies of tourism in Thailand, conducted by the author between 1977 and 1985.Ambivalence in the tourist's role makes him or her vulnerable to criminals, to a country's law and legal process, and to different attitudes of law enforcing agencies. The more a tourist moves about independently, and away from the protective shelter of an ‘environmental bubble’, the more he or she will be at risk.
The research presented here has two key objectives. The first is to apply risk terrain modeling (RTM) to forecast the crime of shootings. The risk terrain maps that were produced from RTM use a range of contextual information relevant to the opportunity structure of shootings to estimate risks of future shootings as they are distributed throughout a geography. The second objective was to test the predictive power of the risk terrain maps over two six‐month time periods, and to compare them against the predictive ability of retrospective hot spot maps. Results suggest that risk terrains provide a statistically significant forecast of future shootings across a range of cut points and are substantially more accurate than retrospective hot spot mapping. In addition, risk terrain maps produce information that can be operationalized by police administrators easily and efficiently, such as for directing police patrols to coalesced high‐risk areas.
A leading sociological theory of crime is the “routine activities” approach (Cohen and Felson, 1979). The premise of this ecological theory is that criminal events result from likely offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians against crime converging nonrandomly in time and space. Yet prior research has been unable to employ spatial data, relying instead on individual- and household-level data, to test that basic premise. This analysis supports the premise with spatial data on 323,979 calls to police over all 115,000 addresses and intersections in Minneapolis over 1 year. Relatively few “hot spots” produce most calls to Police (50% of calls in 3% of places) and calls reporting predatory crimes (all robberies at 2.2% of places, all rapes at 1.2% of places, and all auto thefts at 2.7% of places), because crime is both rare (only 3.6% of the city could have had a robbery with no repeat addresses) and concentrated, although the magnitude of concentration varies by offense type. These distributions all deviate significantly, and with ample magnitude, from the simple Poisson model of chance, which raises basic questions about the criminogenic nature of places, as distinct from neighborhoods or collectivities.