Public Data in Crime Hot-Spots Assessment of Urban Environment

Abstract

A significant problem of Russian environmental criminology is the lack of access to empirical data on violations committed in the urban environments for architects and urban planners. It turns out that all the recommendations we are developing to improve the safety of cities lack the necessary thoroughness. May seems that it should be in the works of another group of researchers, those who work in law schools and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and has needed allowances. However, the spatial solutions offered by them, are extremely utilitarian and also do not stand up to criticism.

The practice of using social media data to work with different urban environment features has been successfully developed in urban studies worldwide in the last decade. This article describes the attempt to create a crime and incidents database on the basis of this data type. The research method contains the creation of software tools for searching, cleaning and mapping data. Using Yekaterinburg city as an example, the author demonstrates the existing crime hot-spot and describes in detail the hot zone in the city center, whose characteristics largely coincide with counterparts, described by foreign researchers.

The proposed software and the result obtained partly solve the stated problem. The work, done by the author, gives an understanding of its imperfections and the ways to improve the methods. The author concludes that it is necessary to select one type of incidents and to significantly increase the database size in order to reasonably judge the relationship between crimes and the nature of the urban environment.