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Process / pipelineSpatial-temporal crime analysis

Crime Hot Spot Analysis

Crime hot spot analysis identifies the places where crime concentrates far more than chance — the small number of street segments, blocks, or addresses that account for a large share of incidents. Building on Sherman and Weisburd's landmark demonstration that crime clusters tightly in space and that patrolling those clusters deters offending, the method uses spatial statistics such as the Getis-Ord Gi* local statistic to separate genuine, statistically significant clusters from random noise and to classify each place as a hot spot, a cold spot, or neither.

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Sources

  1. Sherman, L. W., & Weisburd, D. (1995). General deterrent effects of police patrol in crime "hot spots": A randomized, controlled trial. Justice Quarterly, 12(4), 625–648. DOI: 10.1080/07418829500096221
  2. Getis, A., & Ord, J. K. (1992). The analysis of spatial association by use of distance statistics. Geographical Analysis, 24(3), 189–206. DOI: 10.1111/j.1538-4632.1992.tb00261.x

How to cite this page

ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Hot Spot Analysis of Crime Concentration. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/criminology/hot-spot-analysis-crime

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ScholarGateCrime Hot Spot Analysis (Hot Spot Analysis of Crime Concentration). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/criminology/hot-spot-analysis-crime · Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20539026