Recorded Motor-Vehicle Theft Across Three U.S. Cities: Changes in Magnitude, Spatial Concentration, and Hotspot Composition, 2018-2023

This repository contains analysis code, shareable derived data, figure inputs, and final figures supporting a comparative study of police-recorded strict whole-motor-vehicle theft in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, 2018-2023. The archive includes strict-core normalized-rate data, interrupted time-series outputs, municipal-boundary H3 concentration and hotspot-transition results, robustness analyses across spatial resolutions and hotspot definitions, source-category and record-unit audits, and the inputs required to inspect the final figures. Raw police incident records and event-level extracts are not redistributed because they are third-party public records that are large, periodically updated, and may retain detailed incident locations. The archive documents the public source datasets, dated snapshots, checksums, ACS B25046 vehicle-availability inputs, and procedures for obtaining the external TIGER/Line boundary data. Version: 1.0.0. This repository supports the manuscript titled "Recorded Motor-Vehicle Theft Across Three U.S. Cities: Changes in Magnitude, Spatial Concentration, and Hotspot Composition, 2018-2023," submitted to Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.