The sense of insecurity and fear, allied with a lack of confidence in the police, drive the inhabitants to adopt measures of individual security. While driving, the car windows are always closed, protected against internal vision and late at night, as a rule, no one dares to stop at a red light. High walls, iron bars, electric fences, armed gatekeepers, video surveillance are the most common features of residential buildings. All these measures make public spaces and the public interface, mainly sidewalks, more insecure, empty of movement and prone to crime.
This work was set up to study the spatial pattern of crime occurred in the city’s wealthier neighborhood: the beach of Boa Viagem, famous among tourists. This study intends to identify the main spatial factors related to different crimes. The different crimes were characterized by the nature of offence as well as type of weapon and strategy of eviction. Each crime is associated to a spatial profile describing overall qualities of the area of the occurrence. The spatial profile compiles eight items related to global and local accessibility, land use and density, visual qualities of the interface and architectural features of the surroundings. The profiles informs the numbers of interfaces (doors, gates), the quality of lighting and the presence of obstacles. Other location features were also considered such as proximities to market places, shopping centers and poor neighborhoods. The mapping of crimes alows the micro description on crime locations. Spatial aspects such as global and local accessibility were described by means of space syntax measurements as well as the quality of vision lines.
The study relies on 3 years of official data regarding crime locations. The spatial profiles were analysed by means of multidimensional statistic analysis. A Partial Scalogram Analysis was useful to describe qualitative and quantitative features of crime spatial profiles. Local results contradict international findings showing different spatial logic for the occurrence of crimes. There is no correlation of robbery with more segregated streets as shown by other international studies (Hillier and Shu, 2000).
The study "Spatial Profiles of Street Crimes" is a part of a research that has been carrying out at Laboratory of Technologies for the City (LATTICE) in the Post-Graduation Program on Urban Development (MDU) of Federal University of Pernambuco(UFPE).
The preliminar results of this study were presented on the 8th National Crime Mapping Conference held in Manchester from 10 to 11 June 2010. They were also presented on a seminar promoted by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) of University College London (UCL) held on 16 June 2010, in London.
On the left: Spencer Chainey, director of Geographical Information Science at the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London, and chairman of the 8th Crime Mapping Conference. On the right: Mauro Normando M. Barros Filho, researcher of the Lab of Technologies for the City, Federal University of Pernambuco.
