The Purpose of Identifying Hot Spots

This may seem like an obvious section to include within a toolkit for hot spotting, but its inclusion is necessitated by the variety of situations that hot spots can be applied to. Before attempting to locate hot spots of crime and disorder in a particular area, a thorough understanding of the purpose behind identifying hot spots must be possessed. Without some form of strategic aim, hot spots are solutions looking for answers.

The original and classic use of hot-spotting was to understand the spread of cholera in London. Dr John Snow marked the homes of those dying from cholera on a map along with the location of wells from which they drew water. Snow observed that cholera occurred almost entirely among those who lived near (and drew water from) the Broad Street pump. Removing the handle of that pump ended the cholera epidemic. The aim, for crime as for cholera, should always be to understand how crime is generated rather than to decide where to locate police officers or local authority resources. This is for three reasons:

• Crime numbers are volatile. Predicting the level of crime in a beat one week on the basis of last week’s figures is an uncertain enterprise. Locating police strength in that way may be little better than placing them at random;

• Crime numbers are most volatile in the most circumscribed areas: Catch 22 here is that when areas are large enough to yield stable crime numbers they are usually too large to allow precision about where police ought to be deployed;

• Crimes may be located in different places on the basis of incidental factors. The same car from which the same radio is taken may occur in different streets and perhaps different beats according to where parking space was available. Predicting crime hot spots is rather like mapping the bubbles in a pan of boiling water in an attempt to discern the shape of the heating element.

The first and second problems become more acute when one divides crime into its constituent types, as is almost always appropriate. Partnerships need to ensure that hot spots are used with a view to treating the cause of crime or disorder and not the symptoms.

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