The Two Criminologies of Place: problems of inference in understanding crime concentration

This paper discusses a recent formulation of the ‘criminology of place’, especially the so-called ‘law of crime concentration’ (Weisburd, 2015), which has been used to justify strategies of focussed deterrent police patrolling, often known as ‘hotspot policing’. First, it briefly discusses the statistical properties of the archetypical crime distribution in order to illustrate what is entailed by a focus on a ‘concentration’ of crime amongst a small proportion of high-frequency targets; second, it demonstrates a number of analytical errors of inference that characterise the hotspot/repeat victimization (HS/RV) research paradigm, which can lead to erroneous conclusions; and third, it seeks to re-establish a nascent, alternative approach to the criminology of place that opens up a more promising path for future research and theory development. In so doing, it concludes that the ‘Big Data’ revolution (or, rather, the ‘analytics’ that have accompanied it) promises to provide the tools for developing a fully sociological perspective for understanding the ‘place’ of crime in society.