Using tweets to understand changes in the spatial crime distribution for hockey events in Vancouver

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Ristea, Alina
Andresen, Martin A
Leitner, Michael
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2018
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Abstract

The use of social media data for the spatial analysis of crime patterns during social events has proven to be instructive. This study analyzes the geography of crime considering hockey game days, criminal behaviour, and Twitter activity. Specifically, we consider the relationship between geolocated crime‐related Twitter activity and crime. We analyze six property crime types that are aggregated to the dissemination area base unit in Vancouver, for two hockey seasons through a game and non‐game temporal resolution. Using the same method, geolocated Twitter messages and environmental variables are aggregated to dissemination areas. We employ spatial clustering, dictionary‐based mining for tweets, spatial autocorrelation, and global and local regression models (spatial lag and geographically weighted regression). Findings show an important influence of Twitter data for theft‐from‐vehicle and mischief, mostly on hockey game days. Relationships from the geographically weighted regression models indicate that tweets are a valuable independent variable that can be used in explaining and understanding crime patterns.

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The Canadian Geographer/ Le Geographe canadien

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62

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3

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© 2018 The Authors. The Canadian Geographer / Le Geographe Canadien Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Canadian Association of Geographers / l’Association canadienne des geographes. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Physical geography and environmental geoscience

Human geography

Social Sciences

Geography

spatial crime analysis

Twitter

hockey

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Ristea, A; Andresen, MA; Leitner, M, Using tweets to understand changes in the spatial crime distribution for hockey events in Vancouver, The Canadian Geographer/ Le Geographe canadien, 2018, 62 (3), pp. 338-351

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