Publication of data on street crime - a proposal for solutions for cities in the Czechia Publication of data on street crime - a proposal for solutions for cities in the Czech Republic
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to present a proposal for the public presentation of street crime data suitable for Czech cities. In the first part, the article review current research on street-level crime analyses in scholarly literature.
We know from research by Weisburd (2015) and others that if we analyse spatial patterns of crime on micro-level, a half of the crime is concentrated in only five percent of street segments. In general, this conclusion is valid largely also in Czech cities and it has implications for policing and crime prevention.
Current projects visualising crime in space such as www.mapakriminality.cz260 present only data aggregated for large spatial units. Such projects are useful to initiate a public discussion in the first place, but they tend to create misconceptions about the actual spatial distribution of crime in cities.
Crime statistics using large spatial units (OOPs, MOPs, districts) provide solid information about macro-regional patterns of crime, but they inevitably and falsely imply that a crime occurs somehow evenly within these large spatial units. Citizens do not have any detailed information about the real distribution of crime in Czechia and tend to fear or act in their lives according to highly biased media representation of crime.
A possible solution to this problem is creation of a corrected Street Crime Index based on a multi-year series of crime data that would provide a realistic picture of crime in the territory, but at the same time allow sufficient spatial anonymization of data.