Studying crime and place with the Crime Open Database

The study of spatial and temporal crime patterns is important for both academic understanding of crime-generating processes and for policies aimed at reducing crime. However, studying crime and place is often made more difficult by restrictions on access to appropriate crime data. This means understanding of many spatio-temporal crime patterns are limited to data from a single geographic setting, and there are few attempts at replication. This article introduces the Crime Open Database (CODE), a database of 16 million offenses from 10 of the largest United States cities over 11 years and more than 60 offense types. Open crime data were obtained from each city, having been published in multiple incompatible formats. The data were processed to harmonize geographic co-ordinates, dates and times, offense categories and location types, as well as adding census and other geographic identifiers. The resulting database allows the wider study of spatio-temporal patterns of crime across multiple US cities, allowing greater understanding of variations in the relationships between crime and place across different settings, as well as facilitating replication of research.

对于犯罪生成过程的学术理解以及旨在减少犯罪的政策的制定而言，研究空间和时间上的犯罪模式至关重要。然而，由于获取适当犯罪数据的限制，研究犯罪与地域之间的关系往往变得更加复杂。这意味着，对于许多空间时间犯罪模式的理解仅限于单一地理环境下的数据，且很少有重复研究的尝试。本文介绍了犯罪开放数据库（Crime Open Database，简称CODE），该数据库收录了来自美国十个最大城市在11年间的1600万起犯罪事件，涵盖了60多种犯罪类型。每个城市的开放犯罪数据均通过多个不兼容的格式进行发布，并已进行处理，以协调地理坐标、日期和时间、犯罪类别及位置类型，同时增加了人口普查和其他地理标识符。该数据库的构建使得对多个美国城市犯罪的空间时间模式进行广泛研究成为可能，从而加深了对不同环境下犯罪与地域之间关系差异的理解，并促进了研究的重复验证。