Criminal Justice Matters Article


The role of Crime Mapping in prevention: more than just pretty maps 

 

Many tools and techniques can be employed in the pursuit of preventing 

crime.  One in particular, which transcends organisational boundaries and 

conflicting departmental priorities, is the approach of mapping crime alongside 

other related variables.  In recent years the realisation that crime can be 

explained and understood in more depth when exploring its geographical 

components has led to it becoming a central tool within policing and crime 

reduction agencies. 

 

‘Crime mapping’ can be thought of as the geographical exploration and 

visualisation of crime.  To frame it within its academic milieu, it is the research 

field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) synthesised with the practical 

modern-day issues which affect the Criminal Justice System.  GIS is also the 

term we give to ‘a computer system for capturing, managing, integrating, 

manipulating, analysing and displaying data which is spatially referenced to 

the Earth’ (McDonnell and Kemp, 1995:42).  Containing powerful functionality, 

these software packages allow the user to analyse crime data in a myriad of 

ways.  Underpinning the technical attributes of crime mapping (i.e. which 

buttons to press on the computer application), are several interconnected 

theories on the geography of crime.  These form a practical subset of 

mainstream criminology, known as ‘environmental criminology’.  Such 

theories play a vital role in understanding some of the drivers of offending 

behaviour and should be studied by anyone attempting to use crime mapping 

as an analytical technique. 

 

To consider crime in its simplest form Brantingham and Brantingham (1981) 

have broken it down into the following four dimensions that every crime 

possesses: 

 

1. A legal dimension (a law must be broken); 

2. A victim dimension (someone or something has to be targeted); 

3. An offender dimension (someone has to commit the crime); and 

4. A spatial dimension (it has to happen somewhere). 



 

Environmental criminologists are drawn to focussing their attention on the 

latter of these, where spatial dimension is defined as a place in space and 

time.  This is due to the fact that one of the most undisputed and reoccurring 

research findings within criminology in the last century is that the majority of 

crime types cluster in space and time.  This is by virtue of crime having an 

inherent geographical quality (Chainey and Ratcliffe, 2005).  The general 

agreement within environmental criminology therefore, is that it is far easier to 

consider where opportunities to commit crimes are clustered (and are 

therefore rife) and try to design ways to block those opportunities, than to try 

and change human behaviour en masse. 

 

Crime prevention can be considered as a two-pronged approach, firstly 

averting any persons from starting to commit crime and secondly intervening 

in persons who have already committed offences before any additional activity 

results (Brantingham and Faust 1976).  Crime mapping offers considerable 

scope to intercede in both of these situations.  For example, one might 

analyse where the greatest concentrations of offenders released from prison 

are residing in order to strategically place rehabilitation services.  Or perhaps 

one could start to disentangle the complex relationships between social 

deprivation, community cohesion and clustering of hate crime to better 

understand neighbourhood dynamics.  The uses are almost infinite, as a GIS 

is not limited to simply displaying data on a map, but enables many different 

layers of area based data (e.g. population, schools, deprivation, housing, 

pedestrian footfall, sites of interest) to be interrogated either in conjunction 

with, or separately from crime data. 

 

Hotspot analysis within policing is the most common application of GIS to 

crime data, alerting the police to where there are greater concentrations of 

crime when compared to the wider area under study (which can be as 

localised to the neighbourhood level or as wide as a police force).  There are 

a number of uses for hotspot maps; they can play a role in briefing police 

patrols, who can inhibit offending by patrolling (either in vehicles or on foot) in 

an intelligent manner.  They can be used for accountability amongst police 



leaders.  The identification of hotspots can sometimes be enough to coerce 

crime prevention activity.  For example, if a housing estate features within a 

compact residential burglary hotspot, this alone is enough evidence to send 

some PCSOs or community wardens to the location to distribute crime 

prevention advice to residents.  Maps can feature in tactical or strategic 

planning meetings so that decision makers are aware of where resources 

need to be deployed. Very often a map is merely the starting point; the 

powerful visual outputs created foster curiosity and provoke thought which 

enhances debate around prevention strategies.   

 

When designing successful crime prevention initiatives it is first essential to 

comprehend the underlying causes, or what is driving a crime problem to 

manifest in the way it does.  This encompasses an appreciation of where 

events cluster in space and time, which can help to illuminate any 

mechanisms which are working to exacerbate the problem.  Problem solving 

techniques have now been widely adopted within Crime and Disorder 

Reduction partnerships (CDRP), and are heavily endorsed by governmental 

guidance.  Such analyses focus on specific, recurring problems and aim to 

remove the causes of crime by identifying problems that require attention 

(Clarke and Eck, 2003).  Intrinsic to problem-solving analysis is the diagnosis 

of a crime problem, and mapping can help to drill down into the data to define 

what is going on.  The more specific our knowledge about crime problems, the 

better we understand what is going on and, as a corollary, the better equipped 

we are to implement successful intervention initiatives. 

 

Geographical profiling is another technique that seeks to prevent crime.  

Instead of trying to reduce the opportunities at a particular location, it aims to 

get a series of crimes detected, thus incapacitating the offender and 

preventing them from committing further offences.  Geographic profiling is an 

investigative aid, an approach which is used in conjunction with a raft of other 

investigative strategies to prioritise suspects or resources (Rossmo, 2000).  It 

uses what environmental criminology has taught us about how offenders 

interact with space, and applies these findings to construct maps which allude 

to where an offender’s anchor point (i.e. home or work site) is likely to be 



situated.  Geographic profiling was originally used in serious, serial crime 

patterns in order to maximise the best opportunities for apprehending an 

offender and bringing them to justice.  More recently however, this technique 

is being refined so that it can be applied to more volume crime types such as 

burglary and vehicle crime. 

 

Crime mapping has increased in sophistication in recent years and many 

academics and practitioners are now looking at ways in which to look 

prospectively at crime patterns, instead of the traditional manner of looking 

back at what has happened in the past.  Crime forecasting is thus an 

extremely exciting research agenda at present; if crime can be predicted, it 

tangibly follows that it can be prevented.  Research being conducted at the Jill 

Dando Institute of Crime Science is devising and refining new ways of 

predicting where crime will happen using the evidence base that 

environmental criminology has provided.  For example, research conducted 

on burglary shows that it exhibits communicative properties, that is the risk to 

houses surrounding the original burgled premises are at an elevated risk for a 

short time period after (Bowers, Johnson and Pease, 2004).  Other research 

has shown that by breaking hotspots down into different police personnel 

shifts, crime patterns differ over the course of the day and can be used 

tactically to deploy crime prevention measures.  Hence prospective mapping, 

although in its infancy, is a thrilling enterprise and one that is sure to develop 

further in the coming years.  

 

Crime mapping cannot prevent or solve crime independently.  It requires a 

dedicated number of Criminal Justice System staff to generate, interpret, 

understand and react on the outputs it creates.  Crime mapping increases our 

understanding of crime problems and can begin the process of really getting 

to grips with what would best prevent those offences from continuing.  Crime 

mapping can therefore play a vital role within criminal justice agencies and 

consequently the united goal of crime prevention. 

 

 

 



References 

 

Bowers, K.J., Johnson, S.D., & Pease, K. (2004). Prospective Hotspotting: 

The Future of Crime Mapping? The British Journal of Criminology, 44, pp. 

641-658. 

 

Brantingham, P.J. and Brantingham, P.L. (1981). Environmental Criminology. 

Prospect Heights: Waveland Press. 

 

Brantingham, P. and Faust, F. (1976). A conceptual model of crime 

prevention. Crime and Delinquency. 22, pp.284-296. 

 

Chainey, S.P. and J.H Ratcliffe (2005). GIS and Crime Mapping. London: 

Wiley. 

 

McDonnell, R. and Kemp, K. (1995). International GIS Dictionary. Cambridge: 

GeoInformation International. 

 

Rossmo, D.K. (2000). Geographic Profiling.  Boca Raton: CRC Press.