Mapping the Fear of Crime, a Web Based GIS Solution to Capturing Fuzzy Geography or

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Mapping the Fear of Crime, a Web Based GIS
Solution to Capturing Fuzzy Geography or
what the dodgy area near me Grans means

• Andy Evans Leeds University
• http//www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/
• Centre for Computational Geography, School of
  Geography, University of LeedsLeeds, UK, LS2 9JT

Tim Waters Bradford Council http//www.bradford.
gov.uk Jacobs Well, Bradford, BD1 5RW
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In Brief

• The Geography of everyday the vernacular.
• Fear of crime, and how to map it
• What sort of results can we get
• What can we do with these results

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How do people relate to the world?

• How people relate to the world
• Fear of Crime
• Capturing vernacular geography
• Using vernacular geography
• Case study on West Yorkshire Town

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Affects our behaviour

• The way we perceive areas directly influences
  most of our day-to-day activities.
• Go to the shops for lunch
• Avoid the bad bit of town
• Move to the suburbs
• But we have no clear geographical idea of where
  these areas are!
• How can we even attempt to map
• the dodgy area near me Grans ?

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Vernacular Geography

• Locational
• Downtown
• The East End
• Mount Snowdon
• Loaded
• High crime area
• Posh part around the park
• The grim area of town

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Think GIS?

• Pretty much everyone
• Doesnt think GIS
• Uses geographical terms they cant define
• Mixes up attribute datasets
• Rarely puts anything precisely on a map
• Causes a problem for the crime mappers!

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Its Good Important
She walked through the crumbling old hilly part
of town Gives us geographical information with
built in data about environmental,
socio-economic and architectural attributes.

• Defines areas that constrain our activities
• I wouldnt walk through the rough part of town
  alone
• This constraint should be shared, and acted upon
• thats a pretty high crime area

We need more police here
BUT! Hard to tie into objective true data
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Vernacular is also fuzzy

• Fuzzy boundaries occur
• Continuousness
• Where does a mountain start?
• Crime hotspots lukewarm?
• Aggregation
• Soil types
• Averaging
• River on a map
• Ambiguity
• Definition of high crime areas

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Fear of crime examplevernacular fuzzy

• If you asked 10 people in the street
• Define and explain areas where they are afraid
  to walk in the dark
• Datasets people use are continuous and discrete
  at differing scales, historical, architectural,
  temporal and mythological.
• Smart end of town 25 Cromwell Street
• Areas are linguistically ambiguous
• Areas may by bound by landscape (I.e. within the
  ring-road) but more usually diffuse
• Often have different levels of intensity with the
  areas
• Differences between people.

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Fear of Crime

• How people relate to the world
• Fear of Crime
• Capturing vernacular geography
• Using vernacular geography
• Case study of West Yorkshire Town

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Importance of Perceptions

• Susan Smith (1989) summarises fear of crime
  Fear is more than simply awareness about crime,
  and more than concern about the problem of local
  deviance. Rather, fear is a state of constant or
  intermittent anxiety its effects reach beyond
  the prudent management of risk to impinge on
  public morale, individual well-being and the
  quality of social life.
• Garofalo (1981) connects fear of crime with the
  environment an emotional reaction characterised
  by a sense of danger and anxietyproduced by the
  threat of physical harmelicited by perceived
  cues in the environment that relate to some
  aspect of crime
• fear of crime will grow unless unchecked.
• As an issue of social concern, it has to be
  taken as seriously
• ascrime prevention and reduction (Home Office
  1989).

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Reality ! Perception but Perception gt Reality

• Most studies
• The pattern of fear does not equal the pattern of
  reality

Although fears of being victimised are widely
held and influence behaviour in space, they are
out of proportion to real levels of risk (Evans
1989) It is the fear, often exaggerated, of
victimisation which creates most of the stress
The police actually witness and discover very few
offences, citizen vigilante groups have disbanded
out of the frustration of seeing nothing to
report crime prevention should focus on its
passive role of allying fear as well as on its
active role as a deterrent to offenders.
(Herbert 1982) This may seem controversial. Why
exaggerate? So is Fear more important?
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Effects of Fear of Crime

• It ruins the sense of community and makes some
  places no-go areas.
• Wealthy people protecting themselves or moving
  from the area, this may lead to crime being
  displaced onto those already suffering.
• It could lead to people being disillusioned with
  the criminal justice system, with a feeling of
  helplessness. This could lead to vigilante groups
  or even lynch mobs.
• When people are afraid, they change their habits.
  They tend to stay at home more. When they go out
  they avoid dangerous activities like taking
  public transport, walking down a certain road,
  being near certain types of people etc.
• For people fearing victimisation at any time,
• a journey outside the home, (or even within
  it) is
• like walking through a minefield

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What Influences Fear?

• Mass media. More column inches about crime
  more fear
• Direct experience of crime.
• Interpersonal communication about anothers
  experience.
• politics!

Conservative Advert "This misleading advert
quite improperly seeks to stir up fear of rising
crime when it is a well established that crime
has been falling for years". Richard Brunstrom,
chief constable, North Wales Police 1 April 2005
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More influences

• Environment Litter, graffiti, noise,
  dereliction,
• abandoned cars.
• Anti-Social Behaviour Drunks, gangs of youth
  etc.
• Confidence in the Police and authorities.
• Perceived seriousness of offences.
• Labelling and reputation of areas.

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Mapping Fear of Crime

• Some studies done
• Drawn dots on the paper map with pens
• Asked about areas but constrain area in polygon
• Crayons to specify boundaries then digitised
• Doesn't take into account vernacular geography.
• Hard work too!

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Capturing vernacular (fuzzy) geography

• How people relate to the world
• Fear of Crime
• Capturing vernacular geography
• Using fuzzy geography
• Case study on West Yorkshire Town

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Fear of crime example

• Define and explain areas where they are afraid to
  walk in the dark
• Continuous and discrete at differing levels
  spatially other
• Areas are linguistically ambiguous
• Areas more usually diffuse no firm boundaries
• Levels of intensity within the areas
• The dodgy area near me Grans
• How can we record this on a map?
• And would it be easy to do?

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Capturing vernacular data

• Input
• A spray-can interface for a online GIS, that
  allows areas to be mapped and comment attributes
  to be attached.
• Storage and analysis
• A compression combination component
• Output
• A way of representing all users data and
  searching for the comments in order of users
  perceived importance.

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Input GUI
User sprays on map
Change spray size
Wipe the map
Adds new areas
When done clicks on send button
Writes in comments
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Storage Analysis

• Aggregation
• Average of all inputs
• Compression
• Weighting
• Admin access
• Moderation
• Extract

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Query GUI
User clicks on map
Ranked Comments Displayed
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System Demonstration

• Crime Mapping Conference Demo
• Feel free to play with this!
• http//tinyurl.com/4dvn8

My Admin http//tinyurl.com/5qgww
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System Details

• Continuous vs. dots
• Continuous
• Ready made density
• Dot density
• Easier to use.
• Harder to convert into a density map.

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On the internet

• File sizes traffic processing costs
• Could make smaller
• Clipping esp. if sprayed small area
• Complex gradient mapping.
• Vector paths
• Basically Raster is easier.
• Raster layers with lots of variation
• Raster is big!
• Solution Compression

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Compression
Other algorithms could improve on this.
WHY? From 859K to 14K !! E.G. a combined image
and data object of 859Kb was compressed to 67Kb
just using the GZip algorithm, and further
compressed to 14Kb with the addition of the
shrinking process.
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Averaging
- User tests suggested a 9x9 pixel averaging
kernel best represented the areas users had
drawn using the dots. - Tests suggested this
could be shrunk to 5 times the size and
re-inflated without users noticing a significant
change in the image.
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System Details 2 flavours

• Applets Perl CGI
• Easy and quick to set up, but slow
• Applet J2EE servlet (this example)
• Lighter, stronger but harder to set up

input
Query (Admin)
server
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System Developments

• Desktop GIS tool
• Zoom, pan tools
• Stronger admin / moderation
• Easier GIS export

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Case Study

• How people relate to the world
• Fear of Crime
• Capturing fuzzy geography
• Using fuzzy geography
• Case study on West Yorkshire Town

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Case Study - Keighley

• 47,000 people
• Rural centre
• Services over twice
• that number
• - Urban and rural crime
• 2003-4 Around 9569 crimes
• (108 crimes per 1000 pop)

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Keighley

• Live Study (here)
• Questionnaire
• Input
• Output
• admin

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Comments
About areas, about persons experiences, meta,
specific problems
Guard House estate is probably the worst of
Keighley's large estates for high crime.   Anti
social behaviour around the station and shops
These area elected the BNP (hate
crime).   Town centre is worst. The last
question 'what would make you feel safer'
encourages dependency on services and precludes
personal involvement. My perceptions are that
Keighley is generally safe, but that
crime/anti-social behaviour takes place around
the railway station/Chrome however I generally
feel safe during the day/when there are people
around   There will always be a perception of
crime in all areas including on your own door
stop. Known areas of crime are in areas typical
of early council housing estates.   Utley drug
dealing in woods near Cliffe Castle
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Results
Real density
Recorded - Perceived
Combined inputs
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What the results tell us

• toy analysis?
• For us
• where do people have mis-perceptions as to the
  level of risk from crime? (If areas dont
  match)
• what level of crime do people notice as high?
• If areas match)
• What areas (dont) have a bad reputation?
• For users
• How scared of crime are my neighbours
• Does anyone else feel the same way as me

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Other Uses

• Fuzzy Logic
• Demographics
• Geodemographics for highlighted areas
• Questionnaires
• Familiarity
• Analysis of comments

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Issues

• Open to public on the net
• Legal ethical issues vs e-govt
• Moderation / Bias / censorship
• How the maps designed.
• Cartography. Aerial photos?
• Do people know where the areas are?
• Chapeltown Chapel Allerton (Leeds)
• Vernacular areas not the same as GIS areas
• 3 Keighley wards, town council, neighbourhood,
  SRB, constituency etc

?
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Further work

• Larger public study
• System
• Web based system
• Desktop GIS
• Analysis
• Fuzzy Logic
• Disaggregate results
• Comparative studies
• Other applications
• Where is the East End anyhow?
• Where has the best food in UK?

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Summary

• How people refer to areas
• Vernacular / fuzzy geography
• Perceptions of crime
• How we can capture it on a map
• What it can tell us

Now we can map the dodgy area near me grans
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Tagger

• http//www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/software/tagger/
• Tim.waters_at_bradford.gov.uk
• Andrew Evans geoaje_at_leeds.ac.uk
• Play? http//tinyurl.com/4dvn8