Example

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Hotspots for Crime and Disorder Auditing (London Borough of Hackney, February 2001)

In January 1999, the Hackney Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership published its Crime and Disorder Audit 1997/1998 (see also http://www.hackney.gov.uk/crimeaudit/cover.htm). At the heart of the process of the document’s production was the use of GIS for extracting and presenting area based crime and disorder information. GIS was used to map hotspots of crime for particular crime types, provide summary tabular information by crime type for large area geographies (e.g. ward/census tract level), perform area based time analysis (such as specific crime day of the week prevalence), and area based offender and victim profiles. Using the example of street robbery, the use of GIS helped to identify,

  • those areas most affected by robbery
  • the nature of the robbery problem in those most vulnerable areas (i.e. in relation to retail areas, bars, pubs and nightclubs, and transport terminals)
  • that Fridays were the days of the week when robberies were most prevalent
  • geographic offender profiles (14% of robbery victims knew their offender and in a third of these cases were identified as being their neighbour)
  • the use of street closed circuit television (CCTV) in robbery hotspots had the effect of reducing robbery by over a 30% in the first eight months after camera installation.

The GIS analysis was structured to join to other information that helped to explain the nature of the crime and disorder problem across the borough, and help to design a Crime and Disorder Strategy that was well informed, targeted to areas in most need, and concise in describing the actions that were to be carried out to reduce the local crime and disorder problems.

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