Hot Spot Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Weisburd (2015) has proposed the law of crime concentration at places, which states that urban crimes
concentrate in micro geospatial units, hot spots, within a narrow band of high percentages. For example,
in large cities around 50% of crime occurs in only 5% of a city’s block‐long street segments. Should hot
spot programs for crime prevention by police be constant for a year or more over the range from 0% to
5% of a city’s street network, or should they be dynamic? Of course, in the trivial case of a hot spot
being permanently eliminated, police would no longer allocate special prevention. This chapter is
concerned with non‐trivial cases.
While the Koper curve (Koper 1995) addresses optimal duration of directed patrols on a daily basis in
crime hot spots, the literature has been largely silent on longer time‐scales of weeks, months, or years
for optimal duration of hot spot programs. For example, the Telep, Mitchel, and Weisburd (2014) hot
spot field trials in Sacramento called for 15 minute patrols (following the Koper curve) every two hours
from 9:00 AM until 1:00 AM, for a total of 8 patrols per hot spot and day. For implementation by the
Sacramento police, however, should some hot spots have treatment for a year or longer but others for
shorter durations of time—weeks or months? If so, for how long?
To address these questions, this chapter further decomposes hot spots into two primary types by
duration, chronic and temporary. Chronic hot spots are fixed with durations of at least a year, but often
last much longer, even for decades. Temporary hot spots are dynamic with an on‐and‐off behavior for
weeks or months at a time. As such, chronic hot spots merit constant crime prevention programs by
police while temporary hot spots should have dynamic allocations of police resources. Needed for
dynamic allocations are accurate models for predicting temporary hot spots, or early detection with
accurate predictions of persistence. Criminological theories suggest crime patterns that are the basis for
accurate‐enough crime prediction models.
Notable in our paper (Gorr and Lee 2015) and in this chapter is the introduction of distributional equity
of police crime prevention services as an important performance criterion for hot spot program design,
in addition to the commonly‐used effectiveness criterion. This chapter makes the case that a
combination chronic and temporary hot spot program is the most effective and equitable program. In
doing so the chapter reviews related criminological theories, prediction models, police interventions for
crime prevention, performance measures, and police policy.