Crime in micro-places: beyond urban areas

Abstract

Several evaluations support that police can be efficient and effective in preventing disorder and crime when focusing on micro-places with high rates of crime. However, which specific policing techniques work in crime hot spots remains an open question among researchers and practitioners alike. Moreover, while police departments across the US use hot spots policing strategies, the vast majority of hot spots policing experiments stem from traditional-urban areas and successful strategies might not easily be transferred to less urbanized contexts. These limitations of current hot spots policing experiments and hot spots policing approaches mirror gaps in the crime in micro-place literature. This is not surprising since crime in micro-place research is the backbone of hot spots policing. Especially, two major research questions have been left unanswered by crime in micro-place research: How is crime concentrated across non-traditional urban areas, such as small cities, suburbs, and different types of rural areas? And, how are leading criminological concepts able to explain different types of crime across geographic areas? Answering these questions might not only advance our understanding of crime in micro-places beyond urban areas but also, eventually, aid hot spots interventions, specifically problem-based and community-involved interventions in non-traditional urban areas. ☐ To achieve this aim, I, first, developed a unique longitudinal (2010-2017) micro-place (i.e. street segments) data set that integrated relevant situational and socioeconomic place characteristics with criminal incidence and offender data. Second, I assessed spatial distributions of crime for several non-traditional urban geospatial contexts across the state of Delaware (i.e. across small cities, suburban areas, towns, as well as touristic-rural and traditional-rural areas). And third, I created statistical models using multi-trajectory modeling and count-based regression approaches to draw out crime type compositions, offender characteristics, as well as situational and socioeconomic factors underlying high-crime micro-places. ☐ The study, thus, makes several contributions to current crime in micro-place research. First, the study shows that crime is concentrated in micro-places across geographic areas. However, this is not a linear relationship, but crime concentrations also differ within more urban and more rural areas. Second, the study shows that while crime is concentrated in micro-places across geographic areas, the specific compositions of crimes in hot spots differ. Third, the study makes several conceptual contributions by contrasting the roles of socioeconomic and situational crime indicators across geographic areas and by highlighting patterns of crime generating mechanisms across non-traditional urban areas. And, finally, these findings have practical implications for policing and other crime prevention approaches which the study underscores.