Compare methods

	Risk Terrain Modeling (Criminology)	Near-Repeat Analysis
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2011	2003
Originator	Joel Caplan & Leslie Kennedy	Michael Townsley, Shane Johnson & Kate Bowers
Type	Spatial risk-factor aggregation model for crime forecasting	Space-time clustering test for crime contagion
Seminal source	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.	Townsley, M., Homel, R., & Chaseling, J. (2003). Infectious burglaries: A test of the near repeat hypothesis. British Journal of Criminology, 43(3), 615–633.
Aliases	RTM, Risk Terrain Analysis, Environmental Risk Factor Modeling, Spatial Risk Factor Modeling	Near Repeat Calculator Method, Space-Time Near-Repeat Analysis, Near-Repeat Victimization, Contagion Crime Pattern Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Near-repeat analysis tests whether crimes cluster in space and time beyond chance: after a crime occurs, are nearby locations at elevated risk for a short period? Developed in the early 2000s by Townsley, Johnson, Bowers and colleagues for burglary, it formalizes the 'contagion' or 'communicable disease' pattern of crime using a Knox space-time test against a Monte Carlo reference distribution.