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2 Crime Sci. 1 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/crimsci2 and id is 1 raw text is: Ash by and Bowers Crime Science 2013,2:1 http://www.crimesciencejournaI.com/content/2/1/1 Crime Science A comparison of methods for temporal analysis of aoristic crime Matthew PJ Ashby * and Kate J Bowers2 Abstract Objectives: To test the accuracy of various methods previously proposed (and one new method) to estimate offence times where the actual time of the event is not known. Methods: For 303 thefts of pedal cycles from railway stations, the actual offence time was determined from closed-circuit television and the resulting temporal distribution compared against commonly-used estimated distributions using circular statistics and analysis of residuals. Results: Aoristic analysis and allocation of a random time to each offence allow accurate estimation of peak offence times. Commonly-used deterministic methods were found to be inaccurate and to produce misleading results. Conclusions: It is important that analysts use the most accurate methods for temporal distribution approximation to ensure any resource decisions made on the basis of peak times are reliable. Keywords: Temporal crime analysis, Aoristic analysis, Temporal accuracy, Peak offence times Background The routine activities approach to explaining crime pat- terns, first articulated by Cohen and Felson (1979, 590), describes how variations in the availability of offenders, targets and guardians explain spatio-temporal variations in crime. When and where there are more offenders, more targets and fewer guardians, there is likely to be more crime (Brantingham and Brantingham 1993, 6). The pur- pose of this article is to further efforts to analyse these variations by assessing the accuracy of different methods for estimating the most common offence times for certain types of crime for which individual offence times are not known. Academic interest in developing crime-analysis tech- niques has focused on spatial variation in crime (Ratcliffe and McCullagh 1998, 752), with less attention being paid to temporal variation. This does not mean that tempo- ral variation is not important: Felson (2006, 7) described crime as being in motion-daily, hourly, and momentar- ily, on large scale and small'; while Felson and Poulsen *Correspondence: matthew.ashby.09@ucl.ac.uk 1 UcL Security Science Doctoral Research Training Centre, 35 Tavistock Square, London WCl H 9EZ, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article SSpringer (2003, 595) noted that the frequency of crime varies more throughout each day than in any other way. Previous research has shown that the routine activi- ties approach can explain temporal variations in the fre- quency of many crimes. Temporal variation in crime can be explored on many scales-weekly, monthly and yearly (e.g. Baumer and Wright 1996)-but we focus on varia- tion across the day as our scale of interest here. Melbin (1978, 453) noted that the rhythms of crime in Boston followed, but lagged behind, the pattern of routine activ- ities. Cohn (1993, 76) found that day of the week, time of day, school vacations and public holidays-which influ- ence people's activities-all predicted the frequency of police calls to deal with domestic violence. Messner and Tardiff (1985, 258) found that homicides in which the vic- tim and offender were related to one another were more common at weekends, when people spend more time with family and friends. Cohn and Rotton (2003, 356) took this idea further and demonstrated that the frequency and dis- tribution of many types of crime vary substantially on major public holidays, when both offenders and victims are engaged in activities that are different from activities on 'normal' days. These studies all indicate that temporal variation in crime is both substantial and associated with the routine activities of both victims and offenders. © 2013 Ashby and Bowers; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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