Analysts in policing are frequently asked to prioritise and rank order places and people. Usually, it involves recent data, typically the last 12 months or less, and we expect there will be a disproportionate concentration to focus on. Are these concentrations stable among particular people and places? Are there developmental trends that we can learn from or factor into our selection for targeted intervention? Group Based Trajectory Modelling (GBTM), aka Group Based Trajectory Analysis (GBTA),...
Last Updated: July 10, 2024 - 6 min read
At a time when the safety of women and girls in public spaces continues to be of paramount concern, this post looks to spatial analytical methods and related responses for improving safety. Over the last few years, I’ve completed several pieces of work exploring the safety of public spaces for women and girls. This has included developing my understanding of the risks (victim research and surveys, place-based research), the available data and its limits, testing...
Last Updated: April 05, 2024 - 16 min read
Merging multiple datasets and gaining a view of unique persons in administrative data is a regular obstacle for data professionals. But with Splink that process can be fast, accurate and scaleable. We often need to collate a single-person view in criminal justice and law enforcement. It may be to understand a person’s journey through the system, identify a trajectory or help understand overall risk and harm. When working with legacy systems, it might mean that...
Last Updated: July 10, 2024 - 2 min read
The recent Home Office Evaluation report on Grip and bespoke-funded hot spot policing highlighted differences and challenges encountered by analysts in identifying the best hot spot shapes and sizes for their visible policing strategies. Ideally, we want places small enough and hot enough for police officer presence to generate an effect. This short article offers some thoughts when assessing the suitability of the shapes and sizes of hot spots for visible patrol. This is a...
Last Updated: February 24, 2024 - 9 min read
This week the Home Office published its Evaluation report on Grip and bespoke-funded hot spot policing, which was the largest national effort in observing and evaluating visible patrol as a strategy to reduce crime in hotspots - in this case high violence locations in England and Wales. For similarly large-scale national efforts at hotspots, we probably have to go back some way to the Burglary Reduction Initiative (1998-2002, 247 sites, problem-solving at hotspots) and Street...
Last Updated: February 17, 2024 - 7 min read
If you’re working in law enforcement or with crime data, it’s quite likely that you will have been asked to produce data aggregated to a large spatial unit — like a neighbourhood, census block or ward, or even areas as large as cities and towns — for the purpose of prioritising geographical locations for additional resource But is that an efficient way to target geographically? Perhaps a rationale behind such requests is that large defined...
Last Updated: February 24, 2024 - 2 min read