Space, Time, and Crime
FOURTH EDITION
Hart & Lersch
CAROLINA ACADEMIC PRESS
Introduction / Chapter 1
Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
Introduction:
Aurora, Co Movie Theatre Shootings
70 wounded; 12 killed during midnight
screening of The Dark Knight Rises
 Random time / place for violent
victimization of complete strangers
 This type of violence is exception, not rule
 Lack of pattern made crimes especially
newsworthy

Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
Introduction, cont.

Basic Assumptions for course:
 Crime
is not evenly distributed across
locations, times, victims, or targets
 Certain locations, times are more dangerous
than others
 Certain groups of people have a much higher
likelihood of becoming a victim of crime
 Crime is not a random event
Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1:
Places and Spaces in History
Interest in the examination of crime and space
dates back to early 1800s
 Adriano Balbi and Andre-Michel Guerry are
usually credited with being first creators of maps
of crime
 First national crime stats were released in
France in 1827; combined with census data
 Balbi & Guerry found that wealthy areas had
high property crime; areas with low education
had low rates of violent crimes

Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
Work of Adolphe Quetelet





Quetelet was a mathematician; able to use
sophisticated stats
Found young, poor, male, and unemployed
persons were more likely to commit crimes
Found fewer reported crimes in areas with high
poverty, unemployment
Concluded crimes were more likely to be
committed by poor & unemployed against
wealthy, educated persons
Inequality was important; felt poor were drawn
into wealthier areas to commit crimes
Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
Declining interest in
geography of crime
Analysis was difficult without calculators or
statistical programs
 Data availability was poor; France was
exception

 In
U.S. there was no bank of modern,
national data
 Study of geography of crime in U.S. sat
dormant until Chicago School of Criminology,
early 1900s
Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
What is Space?

Places versus spaces
 Places
 Ex:
house, business, classroom, individual
address, etc.
 Places are much smaller than spaces
 A place is an individual point in a space
 Spaces
 Neighborhoods,
census tracts, larger territories
Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
Defining Spaces
Spaces may be defined a number of ways
 “Official” boundaries—census blocks,
crime tracts, planned neighborhoods by
developers, etc.
 Informal boundaries—where do residents
define their neighborhood? May not
coincide with “official” boundaries
 Personal boundaries—defined by cognitive
or internal mental maps

Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
What is Time?
Study of time in relation to the occurrence
of crimes is called temporal analysis
 Table on Page 8: High risk places and
times

 More
likely to be a victim of homicide / agg.
assault during evening hours on a weekend
 More likely to have your home broken into
during the daytime on a weekday
Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
Moments in Time
Moment: Provides the time that a crime
occurred in space—when and where
 Pinpointing time of a crime can be difficult

 Exact
time crimes
 Time
may be determined with relative accuracy by
victim
 More likely to be violent personal crimes, such as
robbery, rape, assault
Copyright © 2015 Timothy C. Hart, Kim
Michelle Lersch. All rights reserved.
The full set of PowerPoint slides is
available upon adoption.
Email bhall@cap-press.com
for more information.