The Co-Occurrence of Crime Types

• In Event: Geography, Place, and Social Ecology

Abstract

This study examines the spatial co-occurrence of crime types in relation to two alternative theoretical explanations. Environmental criminology suggests that specific environmental settings may host specific types of crime events. Crime types of a general category should therefore co-occur in environmental settings where they are similarly well suited; thus high pairwise correlations between crime types should happen more often than chance. By contrast, a neutral theory expects crime events of a given type to occur in space independently of specific environmental settings and other crime types (Brantingham, 2016). This study tests this neutral model against a sample of crime incidents occurring in St. Louis, MO during 2016. The frequency of crime types are tabulated for repeated random samples of fixed area sizes and binary correlations are calculated for all pairwise crime type combinations. The variance in the distribution of correlation coefficients detects whether the spatial co-occurrence of crime types departs from theoretically neutral expectations. Discussion of the results includes how neutral models may be useful in the study of crime, and what findings in support of neutral theory might mean for theory and policy.

Author

• Theodore S Lentz, University of Missouri - St. Louis