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Crime in public places is an increasing concern for the police, users of public places and the general public at large. Significantly, users of public transport facilities consistently perceive their risks from crime to be considerably higher, hurting levels of patronage. The aim of this study is to examine concerns for personal safety and measures that could improve sense of personal safety in a Nigerian public transport facility. This study further examines whether respondents’ perceptions determine frequent use of this public place. Explanatory factors are personal safety and place improvements concerns ratings.

The study adopted a case study. The selection of this was accomplished using carefully defined criteria in previous studies. The research process consists of three steps the on-site assessment, objective insecurity assessment and subjective insecurity survey. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Quantitative data were explored using mean ranking, percentages and correlation, whereas qualitative information was analysed using narrative techniques of reporting. To define the major determinants of the frequent use of this public place, a multiple ordinary least squares regression was constructed for variables in the correlation model.

Results show that places within the site are not designed to meet crime prevention through environmental design strategies, as 625 crimes were documented with thefts well above other listed crimes. Respondents exhibited a significant level of concern for their safety across all the factors enumerated while the most important improvements concern was enhancements to lighting. Generally, findings suggest that there is still much to be done to improve elements of surveillance, access control, territoriality, image management and activity support on the site. Regression model shows that efforts to enhance perceived safety of users would have major significance on the frequent use of this facility.

Policies on public place developments should be mainly in terms of tackling the environmental design of car parks and the effects of darkness at night time. This should involve improvement of lighting and the installation of CCTV, security camera as well as constant maintenance of bushes, vegetation, plants, trees and other elements of the landscape. Furthermore, the aesthetics of the site has to be attractive to users. The site and its closest surroundings have to be well-maintained and cared for. Besides, place lines and private areas must be defined with plants, pavement treatments, short walls or fences.

Previous studies on safety and security of public transport places, particularly rail facility, have mainly concentrated on the relations between fear of crime, perceived safety and place improvement concerns. To the best of authors’ knowledge, no study till date has explored how they correlate to the patronage of the transport facility, particularly in the sub-Saharan nations. This study contributes to existing literature having revealed perceived personal safety and transport place improvements concerns to be another important dimension of rail transport patronage in the Nigerian context.

Describes a problem‐oriented policing program in Jersey City that seeks to identify, analyze, and target drug, disorder, and violent crime problems in public housing. Describes the problem scanning and identification processes that were used to detect hot spot locations within six public housing sites in the study. Begins the research with a premise that public housing sites differ from one site to the next and that, even within some public housing sites, some common area places will have problems, while others will not. Research findings support this premise. Concludes that there is a distribution of crime problems both across and within public housing sites challenging the hot spot label universalistically applied to public housing sites. The problem identification process has implications for the way problem‐solving teams approach policing public housing sites.

The purpose of this study is to identify potential changes in crime generators and attractors based on monthly models in a high-tourist destination.

A risk terrain modeling approach was used to assess spatial relationships between 27 crime generator and attractor types in Atlantic City, New Jersey with robbery occurrence for the 2015 calendar year. In total, 12 separate monthly models were run to identify changes in risk factors based on the month of the year.

Results indicated unique significant risk factors based on the month of the year. Over the warmer and summer months, there was a shift in environmental risk factors that falls in line with more of a change in routine activities for residents and tourists and related situational contexts for the crime.

The analytical approach used in the current study could be used by police departments and jurisdictions to understand types of crime generators and attractors influencing local crime occurrence. Subsequent analyses were used by Atlantic City Police Department to direct place-based policing efforts.

With growing crime and place research that accounts for temporal scales, the authors advance these endeavors by focusing on a tourist destination, Atlantic City, New Jersey.

A considerable amount of police evaluation research focuses on innovative approaches to reduce crime at places. This is hardly coincidental; policing and place-based scholars have found crime is highly concentrated, and when police focus on these places, they can prevent and reduce crime. The regularity of such findings led Weisburd (2015) to assert the existence of a “law of crime concentration.” Given that bold assertion, the authors test whether the law of crime concentration is generalizable to one of the most common public safety concerns that police handle—traffic crashes.

To determine whether the law of crime concentration applies to traffic crashes, the authors examined crash locations and times in all counties in Utah across four years. Following and expanding on Weisburd's methods, the authors calculate the bandwidth of concentration for these crashes and analyze various types by severity and possible explanations for variations in crash concentrations across the state.

A small proportion of street segments and intersections experience a disproportionately high number of crashes, and the degree of concentration of crashes may be even higher than that of crime. Further, there are variations in the levels of crash concentration across counties and in the severity of injuries resulting from the crashes.

Place-based criminologists and policing scholars have not often explored traffic crashes in their analyses. Yet, traffic problems take up a significant amount of law enforcement time and resources and are often priorities for most law enforcement agencies. Given what the authors know from traffic, policing and crime and place research, targeted approaches at micro traffic crash hot spots can be beneficial for public safety prevention.

This study is the first to explore the application of Weisburd's Law of Crime Concentration to traffic crashes. Given that police spend a significant amount of time and resources on traffic-related problems in their jurisdiction, finding more effective, evidence-based approaches to address this public safety concern should be a high priority for police and researchers alike.

Virtually all analyses of hotspots have been devoted to a crude counting system, i.e. tallying the number of occurrences that take place in pre-specified units of space and time. Recent research shows that while usually half of all criminal events are concentrated in about 3 percent of places commonly referred to as “hotspots” of crime, similar proportions of harm concentrate in only 1 percent of places. These are “harmspots.” Identifying that harm is a more concentrated issue suggests wide policy and research implications, but what are the dynamics of these harmspots? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper provides a descriptive framework for measuring, as well as evidence about, these patterns and concentrations, harmspots in Sussex, England.

There are four discrete offense categories that account for 80 percent of all the harm within harmspots. These categories include: sexual offenses, violence against the person, robbery and theft. Within these high harmspots, crime counts and harm are strongly correlated (r=0.82, p=0.001). Temporal analyses show that harmspots are not evenly spread across time and place, with night time and weekends becoming substantially more susceptible to harm – more than count-based models. Harmspot trajectory analysis suggests evidence of stability over time within the high harmspots; most harmspots remain chronically inflicted with harm. Violence and sexual offenses are random in their spatial distribution between the harmspots, but robberies and theft are more closely coupled to particular harmspots than others.

Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of future research avenues and crime policy.

This paper aims to evaluate a problem‐oriented policing project that used regulatory policy to foster responsible place management among operators of nuisance motels located in Southern California.

A mixed‐methodological approach was used to ensure that a comprehensive assessment captured substantive outcomes, as well as implementation issues and displacement effects.

Each component of the initiative generated some success, with the greatest crime reduction achieved when all motels were in full compliance with the permit‐to‐operate ordinance. Consistency in key project staff was critical to maintaining program integrity.

The displacement analysis suggests that crime prevention evaluations would benefit from a facilities orientation that identifies locations that might host crime if the targeted sites are rendered inopportune. And, net effects can be applied to facilities research using standardized crime rates.

Ends‐based regulatory policy offers law enforcement an alternative to conventional crime control strategies. Responsibility for crime prevention can be shifted to place managers to reduce the incidents of crime and disorder (reported and unreported to police). Ancillary benefits include better city‐industry communication and more efficient use of city resources.

This research is valuable to police agencies considering the use of ordinances to address crime and disorder problems plaguing risky facilities.

Factors influencing crime location choices are not only significant to rape investigations, but they are especially important for geographic profiling. The purpose of the current study is to use temporal, hunting behavior, and modus operandi factors to determine those variables that influence the victim encounter and release locations in serial sexual crime.

Due to the possible correlated nature of serial rapes, the authors use generalized estimating equations (GEE) on a sample of 361 rapes committed by 72 serial sex offenders.

Results indicate that temporal factors, offender hunting behavior, and modus operandi strategies are significant predictors of both the victim encounter and release sites, but the importance of these factors varies depending on whether the location is in a residential land use area, a private site, inside location, or a site that is familiar to the offender.

Police can learn from the current findings and apply them to subsequent rapes within a series by recognizing the timing of the offense, the type of hunting pattern and attack method used in prior sexual crimes committed by the same offender, and modus operandi strategies, to determine the type of location where the rapist is likely to offend next.

This paper is the first attempt to predict factors related to both the encounter and the victim release site in serial rapes using GEE.

Research shows that crime and disorder tend to concentrate in small, geographic locations and that place-based and problem-solving policing strategies can impact crime and disorder without displacing it to neighboring areas. However, implementation of problem-solving is a challenge. Loosely defined locations, shallow problem analysis, and distractions to problem-solving are cited implementation shortcomings. These shortcomings may be overcome by using the Case of Place approach, a case management strategy focused on documenting and analyzing place-based dynamics and characteristics to inform and direct policing strategies. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The current study describes the adoption of the Case of Place approach in an urban police agency’s operations and performance management system. The authors utilize implementation theory to explore and explain the adoption of this new place-based strategy.

Key findings reveal important structural and cultural challenges to implementation. Structural challenges included modifying supervision structures, creating new positions, decentralizing analytical functions, and redirecting resources to problem-solving. Cultural challenges observed included emphasizing problem-solving as an organizational priority, integrating crime analysts into neighborhood precincts, and centering performance management processes around problem-solving.

The authors explore how implementation dynamics impact the adoption of new policies and practices, and offer a number of propositions for the use of the Case of Place approach within a place-based strategy portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of a police foot patrol considering micro-geographic units of analysis.

Six years of monthly crime counts for eight violent and property crime types are analyzed. Negative binomial and binary logistic regressions were used to evaluate the impact of the police foot patrol.

The impact of police foot patrol is in a small number of micro-geographic areas. Specifically, only 5 percent of the spatial units of analysis exhibit a statistically significant impact from the foot patrol.

These analyses show the importance of undertaking evaluations at the micro-scale in order to identify the impact of police patrol initiative because a small number of places are driving the overall result. Moreover, care must be taken with how small the units of analysis are because as the units of analysis become smaller and smaller, criminal events become rarer and, potentially, identifying statistically significant change becomes more difficult.