The term “scientific” gets bandied around a lot on social media when people want to validate their opinions. However, when you apply a scientific process to a research question you have to do so openly, and with the expectation that your question may receive a negative or inconclusive result. One of the pieces of research I engaged in while completing my second master’s degree was prompted by the question, “Do burglars travel further to commit their offenses than street robbers?”. This was translated into the hypothesis, “Burglars travel further to commit their offenses that offenders who engage in street robbery.”...
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I last week’s article I looked at some meso-level (middle level) Boston crime hotspots,
concerning street robberies/muggings and drug offenses, and how both types of crime were
basically found in the same general areas. In this article I want to look specifically at
personal/private theft hotpots to examine how these differ and look at some of the reasons that
allow such hotspots to get created. In next week’s article I want to look at auto theft in Boston
and how this differs between different types of vehicles along with the seasonal/temporal
aspects and the way these effect crime hotspots.
The...
This is the first of three articles looking at crime hotspots in Boston, using Boston Police Department (BPD), incident reports (I’m using a dataset from 2015 to 2022). In this first article I want to look at the relationship between drug hotspots and robbery hotspots (those committed against individuals rather than commercial places). The second will look at property crime: theft/larceny against individuals, with the third looking at different types of auto-theft hotspots.
Boston's Drug Hotspots
When using incident reports to analyze crime hotspots, it’s important to recognize that some incidents are reported and other...
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This article draws from a dataset provided by Boston PD, of incident reports concerning shootings in Boston between January 2015 and January 2024. The dataset focuses on the victimology (the age, gender, ethnicity etc.) of those shot and doesn’t note what the actual incident was. However, looking at and using other datasets provided by the BPD, these shootings are likely to be the result of assaults, verbal disputes and incidents taking place in private dwellings/homes etc. Out of all the shootings in Boston, only around 0.7% involve violent offenses such as robberies – this doesn’t mean that firearms weren’t present...
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