d). BDC Seminar Series | 13th November 2018

Title:

“Offender residential concentrations: a longitudinal study in the United Kingdom

Abstract:

Despite having common roots in crime concentration research, little attention has been paid to the geographic distribution of offender residences. Questions remain unanswered about how stable offender residential concentrations are over time, or how sensitive this stability is to the choice of spatial scale. Given that many offenders commit crime close to where they reside, an important piece of the puzzle may be missing in our efforts to understand the longitudinal concentration of crime. This paper addresses these shortcomings using 10 years of geocoded offender residence data from Birmingham, England. Descriptive and multilevel analyses are used to establish the most appropriate unit of analysis. Non-parametric longitudinal clustering methods are then deployed to disentangle local variance in concentrations. Individual-level population flows are visualised to demonstrate how even small-area analysis can hide more complex underlying processes.

Author:

Sam Langton is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan Crime and Well-Being Big Data Centre. His research focuses on the geographic distribution of offender residences in Birmingham, England. Sam is supervised by Jon Bannister (Sociology), Gary Pollock (Sociology) and Liangxiu Han (Computing). He obtained a BSc in Social Policy and Government from the London School of Economics ( LSE). After working in accounting for two years, he moved to the Netherlands to complete a two-year MSc in Sociology and Social Research at Utrecht University. Whilst there, he worked as an intern at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement ( NSCR) in Amsterdam, where he completed his master’s dissertation with Utrecht University on residential burglary target selection.