ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Kennedy and Caplan offer one way in which researchers can explain and understand crime patterns. More specifically, they combine risk analysis with geo-spatial analysis techniques in a procedure called “risk terrain modeling” to demonstrate how uncertainty in crime location forecasting can be reduced. By adopting a criminal event perspective (Sacco and Kennedy, 2002) to guide this analysis, this approach accommodates the view that crime emerges from interactions of key factors in time and space. The analysis proposed in this chapter, which the authors illustrate with data from Irvington, NJ, can be performed using propositions from conventional criminological theory and techniques and tools readily available to crime analysts. This chapter clearly demonstrates the utility of an emergence perspective when trying to understand and predict crime at place, balancing nicely with the preceding chapters in this section.
