Hot spots of crime

It should be clear by now in this textbook that crime is neither randomly nor uniformly distributed across space. The theories within environmental criminology, more generally, and routine activity theory and the geometric theory of crime, specifi cally, predict that there will be places that have disproportionate volumes of criminal events, or hot spots. According to routine activity theory a criminal event occurs when a motivated offender and a suitable target converge in time and space without the presence of a capable guardian. Using this simple framework Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson were able to explain the rise in crime rates that occurred after the Second World War. This convergence, of course, occurs in particular places, so routine activity theory is at least implicitly a spatial theory of crime. As such, routine activity theory has been used in many spatial analyses of crime, as discussed in Chapter 3 . And because our routine activities are neither randomly nor uniformly distributed across space, the spatial patterns of crime will not be either. In other words, routine activity theory predicts that there will be hot spots and cool spots of criminal events. In the context of the geometric theory of crime, criminal events occur at nodes, pathways, and edges. These three phenomena are also in particular places meaning that the geometric theory of crime predicts that criminal events are neither randomly nor uniformly distributed across space. As with routine activity theory, the geometric theory of crime predicts that there will be hot spots of criminal events and cool spots of criminal events. Because of these high concentrations of criminal activity, hot spots of crime tend to be hot topics in the news-pardon the pun-but people rarely think critically about them. As a consequence, I would argue that hot spots of crime, or hot spots in general, are often misunderstood.