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What comes first : crime or police? A spatiotemporal perspective on reported crimes and tracked police presence

Book Contribution - Book Abstract Conference Contribution

The majority of motor patrol officers spent their shifts being out in the field. Patrol officers are either assigned and responding to emergency calls from citizens or being unassigned and patrolling police beats at their own discretion. What remains unclear is the existence or the extent of crime preventive effects of police presence across microgeographic units. To this end, more than 84,000 reported crimes and 290 million individual GPS signals from police patrol cars are analyzed. The data is obtained from the Antwerp Police Department (APD) for the study period from 2019 to 2020. The crime data can be categorized into citizen-reported or officer-reported events and the GPS signals allow the calculation of patrol time being spent unassigned or assigned. All used data is geocoded and subsequently map matched to one of the more than 30,000 street segments in Antwerp. Spatiotemporal analyses at the street segment and hour level allow us to investigate the interplay between reported crime and tracked police presence. We report the results from this big data analysis and critically assess contemporary policing strategies.
Book: Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, 21th, Abstracts
Number of pages: 1
Publication year:2021