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Do Crime Hot Spots Exist in Developing Countries? Evidence from India

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An Erratum to this article was published on 23 February 2016

Abstract

Objectives

To determine whether concentrations of crime documented in American cities such as Boston, Jacksonville, Minneapolis, Sacramento, and Seattle generalize to unique environments such as India.

Methods

Two years of motor vehicle theft (MVT) and burglary incidents from two police stations in Jaipur, India are analyzed. The degree to which crime clusters is documented using nearest neighborhood hierarchical clustering (NNHC). These results are compared to several widely cited studies documenting concentrations in the United States.

Results

The NNHC procedure identified five MVT hot spots, which accounted for just .09 % of the two station’s land, but over 13 % of these incidents, and four burglary hot spots, which accounted for less than 1 % of its land, but nearly 23 % of the incidents.

Conclusions

Given the stark differences in the built environment and sociological makeup of Jaipur, a better understanding of the forces that cause crime to concentrate to a high degree needs to be discerned before implementing law-enforcement driven policies derived from the scholarship of American cities. Additional research should also seek to replicate not just the degree to which crime clusters in these unique environments, but also its stability over time and micro place variation.

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Notes

  1. Seven of the eight cities examined in this paper were within the United States.

  2. The training was conducted by a team of experts from Cambridge University. Participants included 145 senior Indian Police Services (IPS) officers from various parts of the country. The training was aimed to demonstrate how international Compstat performance management strategies can be applied to Indian crime conditions.

  3. This assumes there are at least 120° of freedom. This is usually not a problem when examining high volume crime data over longer periods of time. For the current work, no analysis was conducted with a sample smaller than 120.

  4. Ten incidents were excluded which contained only the year of the incident.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, The College of New Jersey, P.O. Box 7718, Ewing, NJ, 08628-0718, USA

    David M. Mazeika

  2. Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, The University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Sumit Kumar

Authors
  1. David M. Mazeika
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  2. Sumit Kumar
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Correspondence to David M. Mazeika.

Additional information

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10940-016-9290-0.

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Mazeika, D.M., Kumar, S. Do Crime Hot Spots Exist in Developing Countries? Evidence from India. J Quant Criminol 33, 45–61 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-016-9280-2

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