Spatial patterns of crime in a medium-sized city

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

Abstract

The study of spatial crime patterns is one of the established debates in both spatial criminology and urban sociology. However, spatial influences on crime are usually studied with regard to individual behavior, the perception of or dealing with criminality as individual attitude. Little is known about the spatial constellations in which crime occurs or is less recorded. The aim of this paper is to bring a classical social-ecological perspective to the study of spatial patterns of crime by using new data. A further step forward in our knowledge is the analysis of such patterns in a medium-sized city, a spatial unit that is widespread but comparatively little studied.
The city of Remscheid (112,000 inhabitants) in Germany is examined in more detail. For this purpose, social structure data (such as age, gender, nationality, country of birth, qualification, (un)employment, fluctuation/duration of residence) at the level of specially empirical designed neighborhoods are linked with data from police crime statistics. Data are available for small areas (66 neighborhoods of between 1,000 and 4,000 inhabitants) and are broken down into 341 types of crime over a 3-year period. In this way, different types of spatial contexts can be examined for their crime patterns according to the type of crime. The empirical results are used for a theory comparison and a proposal for a theory update is presented.

Authors

• Sebastian Kurtenbach, FH Münster

• Susanne Frank, TU Dortmund

• Thomas Terfrüchte, TU Dortmund