Crime geographical displacement: Testing its potential contribution to crime prediction

Abstract

Crime geographical displacement has been examined in many Western countries. However, little is known about its existence, distribution, and potential predictive ability in large cities in China. Compared to the existing research, this study contributes to the current research in three ways. (1) It provides confirmation that crime geographical displacement exists in relation to burglaries that occur in a large Chinese city. (2) A crime geographical displacement detector is proposed, where significant displacements are statistically detected and geographically displayed. Interestingly, most of the displacements are not very far from one another. These findings confirm the inferences in the existing literature. (3) Based on the quantitative results detected by the crime geographical displacement detector, a crime prediction method involving crime geographical displacement patterns could improve the accuracy of the empirical crime prediction method by 7.25% and 3.1 in the capture rate and prediction accuracy index (PAI), respectively. Our current study verifies the feasibility of crime displacement for crime prediction. The feasibility of the crime geographical displacement detector and results should be verified in additional areas.