Advances in Place-Based Methods: Editors’ Introduction (Editorial)

Abstract

For close to 30 years the crime and place literature has shown that micro-places—small areas that may be classified as street addresses, street intersections, street segments, or other small areas (Weisburd et al. 2009a)—are critical to understand the spatial patterning of crime. Specifically, a small proportion of micro-places account for a large proportion of crime in many cities (see Andresen et al. 2017a, 2017b; Braga et al. 2010; Sherman et al. 1989; Weisburd 2015; Weisburd and Amram 2014; Weisburd et al. 2004, 2009a, b, 2012; Umar et al. 2020). Recent research has shown that crime hot spots in micro-places are quite stable over time (Weisburd et al. 2004; Braga et al. 2010; Andresen and Malleson 2011; Curman et al., 2015; Steenbeek and Weisburd 2016; Rosser et al. 2017; Andresen et al. 2017a). Perhaps most importantly, these findings have informed placed-based crime prevention initiatives which have had significant impacts upon crime (Weisburd and Green, 1995; Braga and Weisburd 2010; Haberman and Ratcliffe, 2015; Braga et al. 2014, 2019). While the development of this sub-field within criminology has led to the advancement of place-based methods, that needs to be continued if we are to move forward in the theoretical and empirical development of the crime and place literature and to realize the potential policy applications.