A brief history of the analysis of crime concentration

Decades of research demonstrate that crime is concentrated at a range of spatial scales. Such findings have clear implications for crime forecasting and police resource allocation models. More recent work has also shown that crime clusters in space and time with a regularity that might improve methods of crime prediction. In this paper I review some of the available evidence and provide illustrations of the types of analysis – spatial and spatio-temporal – conducted hitherto. With a few exceptions, the application of formal Mathematics in the study of space–time patterns of crime has been rather limited, and so a central aim of the paper is to stimulate interest in this area of research.