Daily Rhythms 1: Population Denominators and Spatio-Temporal Crime Hotspots

The patterning of crime varies with the daily rhythms of the city. The ebb and flow of urban populations hold clear impact on the spatio-temporal patterning of crime. Thus, accurate population-at-risk measures are required to quantify crime rates. Utilising resident and ambient (Andresen, 2011) population-at-risk measures, as well as geo and time coded crime data for a major metropolitan area in the UK, this paper seeks to determine statistically significant spatio-temporal hotspots for both property and violent crime. Addressing the association between the temporal patterning of crime hotspots and population-at-risk measures responds to recent calls in the international literature (Malleson and Andresen, 2016). Thus, we explore property and violent crime rates in relation to day-time, night-time, weekday, weekend resident and ambient (workday and mobile phone) population measures. Further, we test the suitability of diverse spatio-temporal clustering methods (E.g., Knox Tests and Kernel Density Estimations) to undertake this task. The results of this research imply the need to develop spatio-temporal specific explanations of crime, to consider the interplay between resident and ambient populations and the locations in which they interact