The geography of crime and crime control

Scientific interest in the geography of crime is not new. The large variation in crime across space and time is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences (Glaeser, Sacerdote, & Scheinkman, 1996). In fact, the study of crime started with questions about its geography. Already in the 19th century, Guerry (1833) and Quetelet (1842) published maps of personal and property crime in France, while Mayhew (1862) mapped London's rookeries, a colloquial term used for slum areas. During the first decades of the 20th century, scholars of the Chicago School of Sociology developed an ecological model of urban geography, including the concentric zone model (Park, Burgess, McKenzie, & Wirth, 1925) and an application to juvenile delinquency (Shaw&McKay,1942), that remained a theoretical and empirical blueprint for many decades. During the 1980s, after a long period of relatively modest progress, the advent of opportunity-based crime theories, the digitalization of law enforcement data and crime records, and the availability of computerized geographic information systems (Chainey & Ratcliffe, 2005; Weisburd & McEwen, 1998) gave a new impetus to the geography of crime. Today, crime is regularly and increasingly covered in research articles appearing in Applied Geography (e.g., Barnum, Caplan, Kennedy, & Piza, 2017; Sadler, Pizarro, Turchan, Gasteyer, & McGarrell, 2017; Summers & Caballero, 2017) and in other geography journals as well. While the possibilities and versatility of geospatial analyses of crime have convincingly been demonstrated to criminologists and geographers alike, recent technological advancements call for a reappraisal of established insights in the role of place in crime. Consider, for example, the prospects offered by the availability of online mapping and navigation applications for the study of crime and place (Vandeviver, 2014). Similarly, the proliferation of smartphones (Hoeben, Bernasco, Weerman, Pauwels, & van Halem, 2014) and the adoption of locationtracking technologies (Versichele, Neutens, Delafontaine, & Van deWeghe, 2012) offer new possibilities to study offenders' and victims' spatial behavior. Many of these developments are addressed in the contributions to this special issue of Applied Geography.

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