Compare methods

	Crime Mapping	Risk Terrain Modeling (Criminology)
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	2011
Originator	Rachel Boba Santos, Spencer Chainey & Jerry Ratcliffe (modern synthesis)	Joel Caplan & Leslie Kennedy
Type	Geographic information analysis of crime locations	Spatial risk-factor aggregation model for crime forecasting
Seminal source	Boba Santos, R. (2017). Crime Analysis with Crime Mapping (4th ed.). SAGE Publications. ISBN: 9781506331034	Caplan, J. M., Kennedy, L. W., & Miller, J. (2011). Risk terrain modeling: Brokering criminological theory and GIS methods for crime forecasting. Justice Quarterly, 28(2), 360–381.
Aliases	Geographic Crime Analysis, Crime Cartography, GIS Crime Mapping, Spatial Crime Analysis	RTM, Risk Terrain Analysis, Environmental Risk Factor Modeling, Spatial Risk Factor Modeling
Related	4	4
Summary	Crime mapping is the practice of geocoding crime incidents to their locations and using geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize and analyze where crime concentrates. It spans simple pin maps, area-based choropleth maps, and continuous density surfaces, and underpins the geographic side of modern crime analysis — from CompStat briefings to problem-oriented policing.	Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) represents crime risk as a function of the environment: it identifies the features of a landscape — bars, bus stops, vacant lots, pawn shops, schools — that attract or generate crime, maps each one's spatial influence as a separate risk layer, and combines those layers onto a raster of place to produce a relative risk surface. Introduced by Joel Caplan and Leslie Kennedy around 2011, RTM 'brokers' environmental criminology theory and GIS methods so that crime forecasting rests on the qualities of places rather than on the history of crime alone.