Crime and place: differences in spatial relationship between calls for service and recorded incidents for municipal and campus law enforcement

ABSTRACT

With the advent of more law enforcement open data, researchers are exploring the use of calls for service (CFS) as a proxy for recorded incident information by law enforcement. However, indications are that law enforcement activities are mediated by the agency’s goals with its data. Using data from two different types of law enforcement agencies within the same community, CFS and incident reports for property crimes were tested for spatial association using the co-location quotient. Findings from this study show there is a modest amount of detectable clustering of CFS for the municipal law enforcement agency. However, the large university campus agency did not show any detectable spatial association for these events. This suggests that the movement towards using open data in research will need to take greater care in the selection of data to understand if assumptions about the data can be supported.

KEYWORDS:

• Police data
• calls for service
• incident reports
• spatial analysis
• boundary roles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cynthia Barnett-Ryan

Cynthia Barnett-Ryan is an Adjunct Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University and is a graduate from West Virginia University with a Doctorate in Geography focusing on the Geographic Information Science of crime data. She is currently employed as a Survey Statistician with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. All views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice, or the United States Government.