The purpose of this dissertation is to describe and challenge some of the basic premises, implicit ontological and epistemological beliefs and, by extension, the political values which form the core of the geography of crime. While the discussion concentrates on published research undertaken by geographers, it also introduces relevant research conducted in kindred disciplines utilizing a spatial or environmental perspective (urban sociology and environmental criminology). As a critical theoretical exegesis, the principal focus of the critique is the analytic separation of crime from the control of crime, which characterises much of the geographer's research manifesto. Geographers have tended to study either crime or (much less frequently) the judicial system without any systematic consideration of the impact of the control system on crime patterns. In explaining crime patterns geographers have focused their analyses on the criminal actor or, more commonly, the criminal event. In advocating the advantages of alternatives to the instrumentalist or positivist philosophy guiding the geography of crime, the discussion of interactionist and critical perspectives is designed to show how they facilitate an understanding of the way that control processes exercised by police, the courts, and by elected officials are vital to the explanation of crime patterns. The introduction of these alternative theoretical positions also serves to raise questions about the correctionalist impulse of much of the geography of crime, and its technocratic purpose. The discussion of the philosophical, theoretical and political consequences of research strategies which treat crime and control as analytically separate entities lays the foundation for a geographic perspective on crime in its socio-legal context, for an examination of the effects of criminal justice policy on the actual geography of crime; in short, for an integrated analysis of crime and its control. The effect of the "control environment" is conceptualized at three different levels. The first concerns the influence of various interpretations of official crime statistics on "scientific" images of who the criminals actually are. Conflicting interpretations are reviewed, particularly interactionist and critical perspectives which suggest that maps of crime based on official police statistics may be seriously distorted in a way that geographers have rarely considered; crime maps may be "mental maps" reflecting the selective activity of control agents as much as they represent officially sanctioned criminal behaviour. The second effect of the control environment on criminal behaviour is examined in terms of "ecological labelling", the process through which law enforcement practices may (in part) help shape the "problem" status of various city neighbourhoods or subcultural groups. The third level of analysis concerns the most direct impact of control practice on the configuration of crime. In terms of a geographic perspective at this level of analysis the relationship between crime and control is systematized through the concept of "displacement". Displacement effects are defined as changes of criminal (or related) behaviour in response to changes in legislation, case law, law enforcement policies, or crime prevention programs. In this section the emphasis changes from an analysis of who the criminals are, to an analysis of what certain offenders do (particularly in terms of their adaptive spatial behaviour). A review of research demonstrating the wide-ranging occurrence of displacement phenomena is presented to supplement two empirical vignettes of crime in Vancouver (one on street prostitution patterns, the other on patterns of burglary) which demonstrate the spatial adjustments of offenders to changes in the "control environment". The dissertation concludes by describing the implications of an integrated analysis of crime and control for a philosophical, epistemological and methodological reorientation of the geography of crime. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This study was conducted on-site in Istanbul, Turkey, to determine the effects that mass media has on citizens' perceptions about fear of crime, in particular, and fear, in general. Specifically, the study was designed to (1) determine the tendency of citizens' media consumption, (2) determine the level of fear of crime among Turkish citizens, (3) establish the effect of media on citizens' fear of crime, and (4) determine if gender, age, educational level, neighborhood, and monthly income have an independent effect on fear of crime. To achieve this purpose, after administering a survey in Istanbul, the researcher collected appropriate data and then utilized regression analysis to examine the relationship between media variables and fear of crime. A survey consisting of three parts was administered to 545 Turkish citizens over the age of 18 who currently reside in Istanbul, Turkey. In Part I of the survey, respondents were asked to identify their trends in relation to media consumption, and in Part II respondents were asked to report their feelings about fear of crime. Finally, Part III consisted of socio-demographic characteristics including gender, age, marital status, level of education, and income. The media variables used for this study were, general TV viewing, watching crime drama, watching TV news, listening to radio news, reading newspaper news, and reading Internet news. Regarding the independent effects of socio-demographic variables on fear of crime, only gender was found to be significantly related thereby supporting the research hypothesis. From six media variables, only watching crime drama show and reading Internet news found to be related with individuals' fear of crime; however, this relation disappeared after controlling with socio-demographic variables. In addition, no cultivation effect could be found among the sub-groups of sample.

South African criminology's structural aetiology is in crisis. This dissertation offers a novel account of the nature, origin, severity, implications, and possibilities of that crisis. It suggests that, rather than a normative problem, it should be understood as an empirical one, related to the challenge of crime prevalence measurement. The question of crime prevalence patterns and trends has mistakenly been treated as trivial. This dissertation conducts meta-theoretical and historical analyses to reveal a fundamental criminological quandary: making defensible and testable claims about aggregate crime prevalence patterns and trends is at once both indispensable and impossible. This dilemma is in some respects inherent to the task of primary criminology, but its origin and manifestation are also uniquely crippling and revealing in the South African context. The aetiological crisis is more severe, more fundamental, and more complex than previously thought. In demonstration of this, this dissertation seeks to establish, as defensibly as possible, just one observation about long-term South African crime prevalence trends that would seem to require explanatory effort. It collects official South African police murder statistics over the longest-possible time frame and at the lowest-possible level of aggregation and combines them with census data using Geographic Information System technology. The result is by far the most extensive and defensible possible description of South African long-term crime prevalence patterns and trends. It shows a large, unprecedented, widespread murder rate decrease from 1994 to 2011. This poses problems for existing theory and reveals the discipline's failure to even identify that which is relatively unequivocal and requires explanation. This dissertation concludes that there is an unidentified void at what should be the empirical heart of South African criminology. There is much to gain in engaging head-on the question of how to go about systematic empirical observation in the context of profound ambiguity about the meaning and measure of crime.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel / In this series of essays, I apply the tools of economics to a variety of real world problems. The first essay looks at the impact of a gun control regulation on mortality and crime. A third of US states have removed all restrictions on carrying concealed handguns. This might decrease crime by invisibly arming law-abiding citizens, or increase it by eliminating penalties for criminals. It could have no effect at all, because handguns are easily hidden, so anyone who wished to carry a gun was already doing so. I compare counties along the borders of states that liberalized concealed carry to contiguous counties in neighboring states that did not, using mortality and crime micro-data. I find that deregulation had no impact on homicide, violent crime, firearm mortality, firearm usage, or firearm ownership. The second essay, co-authored with Sajala Pandey, looks at the impact of an earthquake in Nepal on child development. Biologists have posited that prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) has an adverse impact on child development, possibly via the process of epigenetic imprinting which occurs during the first trimester. Researchers have attempted to study this link by using natural disasters as a source of exogenous variation. A shortcoming of these studies is that natural disasters may also affect prenatal healthcare provision, either by decreasing it’s provision (due to infrastructure being destroyed) or increasing it (thanks to aid flowing into the region.) We look at the impact of 2015 Earthquake in Nepal on children who were (a) in utero at the time of the earthquake and (b) in areas severely affected by it. Consistent with theories from PNMS, we find that the earthquake adversely impacted their height-for-age, and the effects were concentrated on individuals who were in the first trimester of gestation. These negative effects were entirely offset by an increase in the consumption of antenatal healthcare. We find that the earthquake resulted in a improvement in development indicators for those children who were in severely affected areas but not in-utero at the time of the earthquake, highlighting the importance of healthcare provision in early childhood. The third essay, co-authored with Andrew Copland, proposes a solution to the problem of assigning multiple scarce goods to agents in the absence of prices, for example assigning seats in courses to students in a university. Students submit a list of preferences over courses, a lottery for rankings is held, and an algorithm allocates each student their top available course, reversing their ranks at the end of each round. Then, for each student, the algorithm compares their outcomes to the outcomes generated by every alternative ordering they could have set. Whenever such revisions result in more preferred outcomes, their preferences are replaced with the alternative. Our solution is non-dictatorial and Pareto optimal. When it converges without encountering a loop, it is strategy-proof. It retains properties even in small economies. We compare our algorithm to alternatives. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

In this research, we propose to use deep learning to predict crimes in small neighborhoods (regions) of a city, by using historical crime data collected from the past. The motivation of crime predictions is that if we can predict the number crimes that will occur in a certain week then the city officials and law enforcement can prepare resources and manpower more effectively. Due to inherent connections between geographic regions and crime activities, the crime numbers in different regions (with respect to different time periods) are often correlated. Such correlation brings challenges and opportunities to employ deep learning to learn features from historical data for accurate prediction of the future crime numbers for each neighborhood. To leverage crime correlations between different regions, we convert crime data into a heat map, to show the intensity of crime numbers and the geographical distributions. After that, we design a deep learning framework to learn from such heat map for prediction. In our study, we look at the crime reported in twenty different neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Canada over a twenty week period and predict the total crime count that will occur in the future. We will look at the number of crimes per week that have occurred in the span of ten weeks and predict the crime count for the following weeks. The location of where the crimes occur is extracted from a database and plotted onto a heat map. The model we are using to predict the crime count consists of a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) and a LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) network attached to the CNN. The purpose of the CNN is to train the model spatially and understand where crimes occur in the images. The LSTM is used to train the model temporally and help us understand which week the crimes occur in time. By feeding the model heat map images of crime hot spots into the CNN and LSTM network, we will be able to predict the crime count and the most likely locations of the crimes for future weeks. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (MS)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The primary aim of this thesis is to assess whether and to what extent serious crime and specifically violent and organised crime, poses a national security threat to South Africa since 1994. To achieve this, the study focuses on serious crime in South Africa before 1994; serious crime trends and characteristics between 1994 and 2009; crime prevention and national security polices developed after 1994; public perceptions of safety and security after 1994; and the consequences of serious crime. In this regard three assumptions were formulated for assessment namely: − South Africa exhibits many of the national security issues of the developing world, as manifested in predominately internal threats to security. − Serious crime is one of the main threats to South Africa’s national security, and continues to have an extremely negative impact on all spheres of life, especially on the country’s social, economic, security and political environments. − There has been increasing concern over the occurrence of crime, particularly serious crime, in South Africa since 1994, despite certain statistical decreases. All three of the assumptions could be verified in the study. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Political Sciences / DPhil / Unrestricted

[pt] Neste trabalho desenvolvemos e testamos um modelo para explicar a escolha entre diferentes atividades criminosas nas favelas. No modelo, os criminosos dessas comunidades escolhem uma ocupação entre ser assaltante, ser traficante de drogas, ser miliciano ou trabalhar honestamente. Mostramos que essa escolha depende da renda do indivíduo, bem como da riqueza média da comunidade e das comunidades vizinhas. Mostramos ainda que a transição do tráfico para a milícia é brusca, mesmo sem externalidades nas atividades criminosas, e essa mudança depende exclusivamente da razão entre a renda da favela e a renda dos bairros vizinhos. A segunda parte desse trabalho é empírica. Nas regressões básicas, o efeito dessa razão sobre probabilidade de uma favela ser dominada pela milícia em oposição ao tráfico é estimado como positivo e significante. Entretanto, quando controlamos para medidas de distância da favela a órgãos públicos o coeficiente associado a essa relação perde significância. / [en] In this article we develop a model to explain the choice between different criminal activities in favelas. Criminals in these communities may choose between being muggers, drug dealers, militiamen or working honestly. We show that this choice depends on the agent’s wealth, his community’s average wealth and the wealth of the communities near him. Also, we have shown that the transition from drug dealing to militia is abrupt, even in the absence of externalities across criminal activities and that furthermore this change depends exclusively of the ratio between the favela’s wealth and the wealth of its vicinity. This article’s second part is empirical. In the basic estimations, the effect of this ratio over the probability of a favela being ruled by a militia in opposition to drug dealers is estimated as positive and significant. However, when we control for measures of distance to public institutions, the coefficient associated to this ratio loses significance.

Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 1998. / Each individual's personal security is basic to the quality of life of a community. If the quality of life is affected by crime or the fear of criminal victimisation, then both crime and the fear of crime should be viewed as a social problem. The fear of crime is the focus point of this study as it produces changes in the lifestyle of the individual and the functioning of the community. Fear of crime generates feelings of anxiety, general mistrust, alienation and suspicion. At a social level, it can lead to a break down of social cohesion, the curtailment of normal activities and an unwillingness to help others. The study aims at bridging the gap in our substantive knowledge regarding the fear of crime. Through the use of a questionnaire, the study further seeks to establish the following: * Statistically measure and describe the nature and extent of fear of crime. * Determine the factors affecting fear of crime. * Account for the differences and variations in the fear of crime according to age, gender, household composition and type of housing, previous victimisation, crime as a social problem, role of the police and community neighbourhood involvement. * Make non-prescriptive recommendations for the prevention of criminal victimisation that might directly influence the quality of life. Research techniques employed in the study included the following: * Literature study of research done on the fear of crime covering the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. * A structured questionnaire consisting of demographicai information and questions pertaining to the factors influencing fear of crime. * Non-probability sampling techniques. * Statistical techniques to test the reliability of the measuring instrument and ten formulated hypotheses. The findings of the study indicate the following: (a) Age is related to fear of crime. (b) Gender is the strongest predictor of fear. (c) Household composition* is related to the fear of crime. (d) No significant differences were found between the type of housing respondents live in and fear of crime. (e) In general, people who have been previously victimised are more fearful of crime then those who have not. (f) Concern about crime and fear of crime are related issues, as people who are concerned about crime, generally fear crime. (g) The role of the police has not proved to be a significant factor influencing the fear of crime of respondents. (h) Neighbourhood involvement tends to reduce levels of the community's fear of crime. The following non-prescriptive recommendations are made: * Improvement of the image of the South African Police Service (SAPS) is a necessity to foster confidence in and respect for policing. * Increased role visibility of the police. * Promotion of effective Neighbourhood Watch Programmes. * Active involvement of citizens in community policing forums. / University of Zululand and CSD

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty·of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Magister Artium (n the Department of Criminal Justice University of Zululand, 1997. / This study is based on the problem of juvenile crime in Emondlo. Statistics show that between September 1991 to end of August 1992, three hundred and seven (307) male juvenile offenders were arrested at Emondlo Township. This is against only 18 female offenders who were arrested during the same period. The investigation aims primarily at describing and explaning attitudes of residents to the aetiology of juvenile delinquency. It explores the attitudes of respondents towards the family, school, leisure time and peer group influence on delinquency. This study engendered the following findings: • gender does not influence the attitudes of respondents towards family on delinquency. • gender has a significant difference towards attitudes of respondents in school influence on delinquency. • gender has no significant difference towards attitudes of respondents in leisure time influence on delinquency. • gender has no significant difference towards attitudes of respondents in peer group influence on delinquency. • marital status has no significant difference towards attitudes of respondents in family influence on delinquency. • marital status has significant difference towards the attitudes of respondents in school influence on delinquency. • marital status has no significant difference towards attitudes of respondents in leisure time influence on delinquency. marital status has no significant difference towards attitudes of respondents in peer group influence on delinquency. language groups have significant differences towards the attitudes of respondents in family influence on delinquency. language groups have significant differences towards the attitudes of respondents in school influence on delinquency. language groups have no significant differences towards the attitudes of respondents in leisure time influence on delinquency. language groups have no significant difference towards the attitudes of respondents in peer group influence on delinquency. occupational categories have significant differences towards attitudes of respondents in family influence on delinquency. occupational categories have significant differences towards attitudes of respondents in school influence on delinquency. occupational categories have significant differences towards attitudes of respondents in leisure time influence on delinquency. occupational categories have significant differences towards attitudes of respondents in peer group influence on delinquency. age group is related to the attitude of respondents towards family influence on delinquency. age group is significantly related to the attitude of respondents towards school influence on delinquency. • age group is not significantly related to leisure time influence on delinquency. • age group is significantly related to peer group influence on delinquency. • educational qualifications towards the attitudes of respondents are not significantly related to family influence on delinquency. • educational qualifications towards the attitudes of respondents are significantly related to school influence on delinquency. • educational qualifications towards the attitudes of respondents are not significantly related to leisure time influence on delinquency. • educational qualifications towards attitudes of respondents are significantly related to peer group influence on delinquency. Recommendations are based on the role of the family, school, leisure time and peer group influence in crime prevention.