The use of digital mapping for exploring and analyzing the spaces of crime has grown considerably in recent years, jointly with the growth of computing technologies. Uncovering hotspots, criminal networks, flows, and investigative leads have become common goals in the application of crime mapping by both researchers and practitioners. While some crimes have proven easily represented by conventional methods of mapping, other crimes have proven quite difficult to represent with this kind of mapping. For some types of crime (e.g. mugging while on the subway or identity theft), the mobility of both offenders and victims moving in and out of the spaces of crime challenges the usability of a simple map as a mode of representation. Because of the itinerant way in which these crime events occur across space and time, they defy representation by the location of a single point of offender-victim interaction. These types of crime events require a novel approach to mapping crime spaces. Therefore, this doctoral research investigates the usability of an approach to mapping crime that combines space and time for a visual account of both victim and offender mobility under event-related constraints (e.g. accessibility to a crime scene). The three key objectives of this research are: 1) to depict three different kinds of crime event scenarios and analyze their space-time context; 2) to create space-time crime maps based on the three crime scenarios; and 3) to assess the usability of these crime maps for practical and research purposes.
The use of geographic information systems and related mapping technologies facilitates law enforcement practice and research in understanding, analyzing, and addressing the spatial aspects of crime. For law enforcement practitioners the ability to visualize space-time data related to their cases should prove valuable. As these practitioners are better able to utilize innovative investigative tools, society will benefit by having more effective law enforcement systems. This research also contributes to pressing scientific questions as researchers struggle with various methods of representing geographic phenomena as real events that occur across time and space, rather than at single locations. To meet these challenges, this project examines the operational aspects of a space-time approach to mapping in the context of crime mapping. Finally, as a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award reinforces the beginning academic career of a strong independent researcher.
