ABSTRACT
There has been a great interest within criminology and crime analysis in the study of local clusters of crime or hot spots over the last 30 years. Hot spots is the term typically used to refer to small geographical areas with a high concentration of crime. There is also now a considerable body of research evaluating police interventions that take this insight as key for articulating responses to crime. Hot spots policing, or place based policing, has become a popular strategy in the US and efforts to adopt this approach have also taken place elsewhere. Theoretically one could use all sort of proactive creative approaches to solve crime in these locations. Thus, figuring out the location of hot spots and how to detect clusters of crime is of great significance for crime analysis. In crime analysis the study of repeat victimisation is also relevant. This refers to the observed pattern of repeated criminal victimisation against the same person or target. The idea that victimisation presages further victimisation was first observed in studies of burglary, where the single best predictor of new victimisation was past victimisation. There continues to be some debate as to whether this is to do with underlying stable vulnerabilities (the flag hypothesis) or to increased risk resulting from the first victimisation (the boost hypothesis), although likely both play a role.
