No Arabic abstract
Hot-spot-based policing programs aim to deter crime through increased proactive patrols at high-crime locations. While most hot spot programs target easily identified chronic hot spots, we introduce models for predicting temporary hot spots to address effectiveness and equity objectives for crime prevention, and present findings from a crossover experiment evaluating application of hot spot predictions to prevent serious violent crime in Pittsburgh, PA. Over a 12-month experimental period, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police assigned uniformed patrol officers to weekly predicted chronic and temporary hot spots of serious violent crimes comprising 0.5 percent of the citys area. We find statistically and practically significant reductions in serious violent crime counts within treatment hot spots as compared to control hot spots, with an overall reduction of 25.3 percent in the FBI-classified Part 1 Violent (P1V) crimes of homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, and a 39.7 percent reduction of African-American and other non-white victims of P1V crimes. We find that temporary hot spots increase spatial dispersion of patrols and have a greater percentage reduction in P1V crimes than chronic hot spots but fewer total number of crimes prevented. Only foot patrols, not car patrols, had statistically significant crime reductions in hot spots. We find no evidence of crime displacement; instead, we find weakly statistically significant spillover of crime prevention benefits to adjacent areas. In addition, we find no evidence that the community-oriented hot spot patrols produced over-policing arrests of minority or other populations.
We propose an efficient statistical method (denoted as SSR-Tensor) to robustly and quickly detect hot-spots that are sparse and temporal-consistent in a spatial-temporal dataset through the tensor decomposition. Our main idea is first to build an SSR model to decompose the tensor data into a Smooth global trend mean, Sparse local hot-spots, and Residuals. Next, tensor decomposition is utilized as follows: bases are introduced to describe within-dimension correlation, and tensor products are used for between-dimension interaction. Then, a combination of LASSO and fused LASSO is used to estimate the model parameters, where an efficient recursive estimation procedure is developed based on the large-scale convex optimization, where we first transform the general LASSO optimization into regular LASSO optimization and apply FISTA to solve it with the fastest convergence rate. Finally, a CUSUM procedure is applied to detect when and where the hot-spot event occurs. We compare the performance of the proposed method in a numerical simulation study and a real-world case study, which contains a dataset including a collection of three types of crime rates for U.S. mainland states during the year 1965-2014. In both cases, the proposed SSR-Tensor is able to achieve the fast detection and accurate localization of the hot-spots.
Police departments around the world have been experimenting with forms of place-based data-driven proactive policing for over two decades. Modern incarnations of such systems are commonly known as hot spot predictive policing. These systems predict where future crime is likely to concentrate such that police can allocate patrols to these areas and deter crime before it occurs. Previous research on fairness in predictive policing has concentrated on the feedback loops which occur when models are trained on discovered crime data, but has limited implications for models trained on victim crime reporting data. We demonstrate how differential victim crime reporting rates across geographical areas can lead to outcome disparities in common crime hot spot prediction models. Our analysis is based on a simulation patterned after district-level victimization and crime reporting survey data for Bogota, Colombia. Our results suggest that differential crime reporting rates can lead to a displacement of predicted hotspots from high crime but low reporting areas to high or medium crime and high reporting areas. This may lead to misallocations both in the form of over-policing and under-policing.
Crime prediction plays an impactful role in enhancing public security and sustainable development of urban. With recent advances in data collection and integration technologies, a large amount of urban data with rich crime-related information and fine-grained spatio-temporal logs has been recorded. Such helpful information can boost our understandings about the temporal evolution and spatial factors of urban crimes and can enhance accurate crime prediction. In this paper, we perform crime prediction exploiting the cross-type and spatio-temporal correlations of urban crimes. In particular, we verify the existence of correlations among different types of crime from temporal and spatial perspectives, and propose a coherent framework to mathematically model these correlations for crime prediction. The extensive experimental results on real-world data validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further experiments have been conducted to understand the importance of different correlations in crime prediction.
Most existing point-based colocation methods are global measures (e.g., join count statistic, cross K function, and global colocation quotient). Most recently, a local indicator such as the local colocation quotient is proposed to capture the variability of colocation across areas. Our research advances this line of work by developing a simulation-based statistic test for the local indicator of colocation quotient (LCLQ). The study applies the indicator to examine the association of land use facilities with crime patterns. Moreover, we use the street network distance in addition to the traditional Euclidean distance in defining neighbors since human activities (including facilities and crimes) usually occur along a street network. The method is applied to analyze the colocation of three types of crimes and three categories of facilities in a city in Jiangsu Province, China. The findings demonstrate the value of the proposed method in colocation analysis of crime and facilities, and in general colocation analysis of point data.
Developing spatio-temporal crime prediction models, and to a lesser extent, developing measures of accuracy and operational efficiency for them, has been an active area of research for almost two decades. Despite calls for rigorous and independent evaluations of model performance, such studies have been few and far between. In this paper, we argue that studies should focus not on finding the one predictive model or the one measure that is the most appropriate at all times, but instead on careful consideration of several factors that affect the choice of the model and the choice of the measure, to find the best measure and the best model for the problem at hand. We argue that because each problem is unique, it is important to develop measures that empower the practitioner with the ability to input the choices and preferences that are most appropriate for the problem at hand. We develop a new measure called the penalized predictive accuracy index (PPAI) which imparts such flexibility. We also propose the use of the expected utility function to combine multiple measures in a way that is appropriate for a given problem in order to assess the models against multiple criteria. We further propose the use of the average logarithmic score (ALS) measure that is appropriate for many crime models and measures accuracy differently than existing measures. These measures can be used alongside existing measures to provide a more comprehensive means of assessing the accuracy and potential utility of spatio-temporal crime prediction models.