Mobility, Notoriety, and Crime: A Study in the Crime Patterns of Urban Nodal Points

Crime has long been known to be spatially patterned at many levels of aggregation. Contemporary explanations of this fact within urban areas assume that it is the result of interactions between the physical distribution of opportunities for crime, transportation flow patterns, and the awareness spaces of potential criminals. Data from a small city in Western Canada are used to conduct a simple test of the plausibility of this theoretical assumption for the crime of commercial burglary. The assumption is generally supported by the data.