Mapping public order offenses: a study of the spatial distribution of perceived risk intensity in the city of Krakow, Poland

ABSTRACT

The article presents a new quantitative approach to studying the feeling of safety and risk perception and proposes a new method for determining the intensity of this phenomenon based on data from the National Safety Risk Map in Krakow. The quantitative methods used for data analysis enabled the authors to identify a clustered process in their research, as well as to locate clusters and to perform data generalization. Based on ungeneralized and generalized data obtained through kernel density estimation, the authors determined the density distribution for two categories of offense (acts of vandalism and alcohol consumption in prohibited places) in Krakow. The final stage of the analysis involved estimating the degree of perceived risk associated with public order offenses which the authors defined using the Perceived Risk Intensity Coefficient (I_pr). This coefficient was calculated as the ratio of ungeneralized density distribution to generalized distribution. As a result, the authors identified those areas where the I_pr coefficient was highest, i.e. those places in which local residents’ threat perception was most intense.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk perception
• feeling of safety
• spatial analysis
• clustering
• kernel density estimation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The study was financially supported by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland (no. BSM068/P/2019) and by the Faculty of Geology, Geophysics and Environmental Protection at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland (no. 16.16.140.315).