Occam's razor and the measurement of crime concentrations

• In Event: WG-PLACE 6: Research on crime, place and time

Abstract

The notion that crime does not follow a random or uniform distribution has been empirically know for almost 200 years. More recently, the identification of crime concentrations has been at the micro-place, most often street segments, and a variety of metric have been developed to measure the degree of any crime concentration in a variety of contexts. In this paper, we review and assess the primary metric used in this literature, discussing their utility and limitations. We then provide a new metric that maintains simplicity in calculation and interpretation, followed by an empirical example comparing all of the metrics assessed.

Authors

• Martin A Andresen, Simon Fraser University

• David Weisburd, George Mason University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem