Spatial concentration and temporal regularities in crime

Abstract

Though crime is linked to different socio-economic factors, it exhibits remarkable regularities regardless of cities' particularities. In this chapter, we consider two fundamental regularities in crime regarding two essential aspects of criminal activity: time and space. For more than one century, we know that (1) crime occurs unevenly within a city and (2) crime peaks during specific times of the year. Here we describe the tendency of crime to concentrate spatially and to exhibit temporal regularities. We examine these phenomena from the complex-system perspective of cities, accounting for the possibility of both spatial heterogeneity and non-stationarity in urban phenomena.