Crime Mapping in The Netherlands

• Activity Number: 414
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Elke Amelie Moons*+ and Leanne Houben
• Companies: Statistics Netherlands and Statistics Netherlands
• Keywords: crime mapping ; spatial data analysis ; safety

Abstract

The widespread use of geographic information systems has led to new insights in many areas of application, criminology being one of them. The emphasis within crime analysis has shifted from offenders to offences and their victims and from motivations to opportunities. In this, the role of the location has been recognized, and the scale at which crime analysis took place became much smaller: from national, regional and metropolitan scales to neighborhoods. The innovative part of this research is the fact that one can choose the scale of comparison. For an analysis at provincial level, it might be useful to compare figures to the national figure, while when analyzing neighborhoods it might be more interesting to compare to the provincial or even the municipal level. The statistical significance of this will be examined by means of spatial data analysis tools.