Hot Spot Policing

Don Hummer & Akemi Hoshi

Crime prediction is not limited to predicting what individuals in which situations will turn to delinquency or criminality. In recent years, researchers have employed new technologies and data sources to identify the “where” and “when” of offending. Knowing that certain locations and times are prone to criminal activity has led to the concepts of “hot spots” and “burning times.” Hot spots are clusters of crimes in space; burning times are concentrations of crime at specific repeated moments (Brantingham and Brantingham 1999). Although the observation that criminal activity is concentrated at some locations and not others is not new, past research focused on criminals' residences as a catalyst for the occurrence of crime (Brantingham and Brantingham 1999)—this despite the fact that crime is often concentrated in other areas. By the mid 1980s, with the computerization of police records and the development of computerbased mapping systems, the geographic mapping of the distribution ...

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