Measuring the Influence of Multiscale Geographic Space on the Heterogeneity of Crime Distribution

Abstract

Urban crimes are not homogeneously distributed but exhibit spatial heterogeneity across a range of spatial scales. Meanwhile, while geographic space shapes human activities, it is also closely related to multiscale characteristics. Previous studies have explored the influence of underlying geographic space on crime occurrence from the mechanistic perspective, treating geographic space as a collection of points or lines, neglecting the multiscale nature of the spatial heterogeneity of crime and underlying geographic space. Therefore, inspired by the recent concept of “living structure” in geographic information science, this study applied a multiscale analysis method to explore the association between underlying geographic space and crime distribution. Firstly, the multiscale heterogeneity is described while simultaneously considering both the statistical and geometrical characteristics. Then, the spatial association rule mining approach is adopted to quantitatively measure the association between crime occurrence and geographic space at multiple scales. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methods is evaluated by crime incidents in the city of Philadelphia. Experimental results show that crime heterogeneity is indeed closely related with the spatial scales. It is also proven that the influence of underlying geographic space on crime heterogeneity varies with the spatial scales. This study may enrich the methodology in crime pattern and crime explanation analysis, and it provides useful insights for effective crime prevention.

Keywords

• spatial association analysis
• spatial heterogeneity
• multiple scale association
• environmental criminology
• living structure