Crime and Disorder Issues and Hot Spots

There are a plethora of issues that could conceivably be mapped and therefore hot spotted. Apart from obvious crime–related ones (such as burglary, auto-theft, assaults, robbery, criminal damage) there are also a number of disorder hot spots that could potentially be identified, including youths causing annoyance/disturbance, litter, signs of disrepair and fear of crime. A comprehensive list is impossible to collate, as different problems will vary in their relevance jurisdictions.

Police forces will have databases for crime related problems, but will probably not document information on disorder type issues. This is because police forces do not routinely record information not pertaining to criminal matters. Alternatives for local councils to investigate disorder issues are to interrogate police command and control databases, of which crime related matters are a subset, or rely on data from other agencies such as health (locations of drug overdoses) or education (truancy rates) departments.

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