THE STORY OF THE CRIME: functional, temporal and spatial tendencies in street robbery

Abstract

There has been growing interest in the relationship between the built environment and crime. Only recently studies have started to focus on particular crime types, and extract its built environment characteristics. Most of these studies focus on burglary as it is the type of crime with the best record of location, and very few of these studies employed a standardized evaluation of the spatial layout. In this paper, we focus on street robbery, one of the least studied crime types. Using the extensive amount of data from a case study area in London we demonstrate the links between street robbery occurrences, temporal and spatial factors in an effort to draw a multi-faceted picture of street robbery and place-based factors. We demonstrate the methodologies and discussions that arose while bringing GIS and Space Syntax analyses together and relate crime data with topological layers, as well as variations of results in different scales of effects We show the tendencies and appearing links between the times and types of robbery methods and global spatial measures like choice, and local measures like the potential movement differences between the crime locations and their immediate surroundings. This multi-factor and multi-scale approach contributes to our ability constructing the missing details or ignored knowledge in the complicated story of crime and built environment research has built so far.