Law of Crime Concentrations at Places

Crime is not distributed randomly across jurisdictions but instead clusters geographically. As Eck and Weisburd (1995, 12) note in their chapter on theories of crime and place, “Crime events are not uniformly distributed, a fact known for over a century. At every level of aggregation, some geographic areas have less crime than others.” This has been demonstrated historically at multiple levels of geography (Weisburd et al. 2009a), and it is a fact that is typically well recognized by even private citizens, who may characterize some locations or neighborhoods as “good” and others as “bad.” What has received less empirical attention until recently, however, is the strong concentration of crime at particular small places across cities. Places in this “micro” context are specific locations within the larger social environments of communities and neighborhoods (Eck and Weisburd 1995).