Identifying Hot Spots For a Crime Audit

Two separate matters need to be stressed: the precision to the geographic component of the data (geo-coded or not) and the purpose of the hot spot (see The purpose of identifying hot spots section). Some police forces have advanced mapping capabilities and can provide a host of crime related data in geo-coded form (that is each incident has been designated spatial co-ordinates) that are accurate. Other forces may only be able to manage to represent incidents at the street level or the beat level. Whichever is the case will determine how the hot spot analysis is conducted.

The hot spots identified and used by police will differ from those used for crime audits. Police hot spots are used for operational purposes and are based on the previous few week’s or month’s crime data. Conversely, crime audit hot spots should have a more strategic focus that police hot spots and, therefore, be based on a larger time frame to ensure that long term endemic trends are identified.

Another difference occurs with the units used to identify hot spots. For a variety of reasons police predominantly deal with absolute numbers of criminal incidents and not rates. Council workers are likely to assess risk in terms of rates. Supplementary data will most likely need to be provided to gauge the relative risk at certain locations (see point 6 How to measure the heat: Counts or rates?)

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