ABSTRACT
During the past 180 years, research in spatial criminology has been performed at ever finer spatial resolutions (Weisburd et al., 2009a). Moving from counties to towns to wards and to neighborhoods, we are forced to ask: what is the appropriate scale of analysis for crime? Is it the neighborhood? Or are there relatively few “chronic places” that make an entire neighborhood problematic, much like a small percentage of offenders may cause a significant portion of trouble (Wolfgang et al., 1972). Research in the “crime at places” literature, a term coined by Eck and Weisburd (1995), 1 has emerged which uses microspatial units of analysis. This research has generated an increasing body of evidence which shows that neighborhoods and/or communities are far from being spatially homogeneous with regard to criminal activity.
