Paper published in conference proceedings
Šimon, Martin, Jíchová, Jana. 2018. „Zveřejnění dat o kriminalitě na úrovni ulic - návrh řešení pro města v Česku.“ Pp. 186-204 in Ščerba, Filip. (ed.). Kriminologické dny 2018. Sborník z VI. ročníku mezinárodní konference Kriminologické dny pořádaný ve dnech 18.–19. 1. 2018 Českou kriminologickou společností ve spolupráci s Právnickou fakultou Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci. Olomouc: Iuridicum Olomoucense, o.p.s. ISBN 978-80-88266-15-0.

Publishing the crime data at the level of street segments - a proposal of solution for cities in Czechia

The aim of this paper is to present a proposal for the public presentation of street crime data suitable for Czech cities. In the first part, the article review current research on street-level crime analyses in scholarly literature. We know from research by Weisburd (2015) and others that if we analyse spatial patterns of crime on micro-level, a half of the crime is concentrated in only five percent of street segments. In general, this conclusion is valid largely also in Czech cities and it has implications for policing and crime prevention. Current projects visualising crime in space such as www.mapakriminality.cz present only data aggregated for large spatial units. Such projects are useful to initiate a public discussion in the first place, but they tend to create misconceptions about the actual spatial distribution of crime in cities. Crime statistics using large spatial units (OOPs, MOPs, districts) provide solid information about macro-regional patterns of crime, but they inevitably and falsely imply that a crime occurs somehow evenly within these large spatial units. Citizens do not have any detailed information about the real distribution of crime in Czechia and tend to fear or act in their lives according to highly biased media representation of crime. A possible solution to this problem is creation of a corrected Street Crime Index based on a multi-year series of crime data that would provide a realistic picture of crime in the territory, but at the same time allow sufficient spatial anonymization of data.

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Topics: 
housing
crime
methodology
public administration
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