Abstract:
This research develops crime hotspot analysis and visualization methodology that use street segments as the basic study unit. This incorporates the distance between points along a polyline rather than the standard Euclidean distance and has some distinct advantages over past methods. For each crime, this method creates a weight according to its distance from each road segment of its surrounding block. To create the hotspot visualization map, crime counts are smoothed over road segments based on the distance to nearest segments and the angle at which nearest roads meet at intersections. Crime data from the City of Alexandria, VA Police Department and San Francisco, CA (available at data.sfgov.org) are considered here using a combination of conventional ArcGIS and R graphics.
