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Hot Spots
Hot spots is a term used to describe places that experience a large number of crimes or places where there is a higher than average risk of crime victimization. Crime tends to cluster in small areas such as street blocks or addresses. These clusters of crime are commonly referred to as hot spots.
It has long been known that crime is not randomly distributed across space. Some of the earliest writers on criminology acknowledged this, including Adolphe Quetelet in the 1800s. Much early research focused on cities or neighborhoods within cities. In a 1989 work that spoke of hot spots, Lawrence Sherman, Patrick Gartin, and Michael Buerger found that “crime is both rare and concentrated,” with 50% of all crime occurring at just 3% of all places. Other researchers have found that not only is crime geographically concentrated but also that the hot spots of crime are stable over time.
The knowledge that crime clusters in small areas is useful for community policing and problem solving. First, it is not that entire neighborhoods are crime prone. Instead, some places within neighborhoods, such as a single park or a handful of street blocks or even a single address, have high levels of crime. Most other places are either low crime or have no crime. This is true even in high-crime neighborhoods—only a relative handful of places within each neighborhood are high crime. Second, various policing interventions at hot spots have been found to reduce crime at the hot spot locations without displacing crime to other nearby locations. Identifying the location and nature of hot spots is therefore often an important step in the problem-solving process. This entry looks at how hot spots are identified, why crime clusters at certain locations, and why it tends to involve certain times of day and types of goods.
The Definition of Place and Identifying Hot Spots
The exact definition of place can vary depending on the focus of the analysis. Sherman and colleagues described a place as a “fixed physical environment that can be seen completely and simultaneously, at least on its surface, by one’s naked eyes.” Examples of places include a single address, an apartment building, a street block, a strip shopping center, or a park. The important distinction is that a place is not as large as a census tract or an entire neighborhood. Places are small discrete areas; hot spots are places with higher than average crime.
Just as there is no consensus definition of a place, there is no consensus mathematical definition of exactly what constitutes a hot spot. Most authors, however, agree that hot spots are “hot” compared to the local distribution of crime. This means that places considered high crime in one jurisdiction may not be high crime in another jurisdiction. It also means that hot spots for different crime problems could be defined differently within the same jurisdiction.
Hot spot identification methods vary by the problem type, the data available, and the purpose of the analysis. The most commonly used hot spot identification method is also the most simple: a visual inspection of crime locations plotted on a map. While pins have long been inserted in paper maps for this purpose, computer-based mapping technology became available in the mid-1990s and spurred analysis of hot spots by police. There are many options for displaying crime information in a way that demonstrates the concentration of crime across space. For example, graduated symbols can be used, where the size of the dots on the map is proportional to the number of crimes at that place. A color gradient can also be used, often with darker dots representing higher levels of crime.
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