Measuring Crime Concentration (Part 1)
What constitutes concentration? In these articles we ask:
- how do we count crimes? And how do we account for and control for heterogeneity in our observations (units with different area and populations)?
- how do we decide if crime is concentrated? What measures are traditionally used?
- if crime is purely random and thus isn't concentrated in any meaningful sense, will we still measure some concentration using traditional measures?
- can we develop a "null hypothesis" statistical model to create a baseline measure, allowing us to differentiate between random and structural effects? What features must this model have to be realistic?
- how do we develop this into a useful measure?