According to the law of crime concentration, a certain percentage of crime is predicted to be concentrated at a certain percentage of microgeographic units, and relatively large amounts of crime are predicted to be accounted for by a small percentage of places. Given the lack of research testing the law in a Swedish context and for a whole country, this study set out to examine the concentration of crime at all densely populated areas in Sweden. Analyzing national grid net data, where all densely built-up areas of Sweden were divided into 250 x 250 meter pixels with added police recorded crime data, the study aimed to examine how many percent of the pixels are required to account for 25, 50 and 80% of the crimes in all densely populated areas; how the concentrations differ between small, medium-sized and big cities; how the concentrations differ between violent and property crimes in all of the country; and how an observed crime concentration compares to a counterfactual, randomized concentration. The results indicated a crime concentration that is stronger than the ones observed in most previous studies, with just 0.4, 2.3 and 10.2% of the pixels accounting for 25, 50 and 80% of all crimes in all densely populated areas, respectively. In line with previous research, the results also showed that crime is more strongly concentrated in smaller cities compared to the big ones, that violent crime is more strongly concentrated than property crime, and that the observed concentration of violent crime is considerably stronger than a counterfactual, randomized concentration in the form of a Poisson distribution. Further research on crime concentration in Sweden is requested to build on these findings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-43706 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Breski, Robert |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Malmö högskola, Institutionen för kriminologi (KR) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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