Crime Concentrations: Hot Dots, Hot Spots and Hot Flushes

Every research enterprise takes place in a context, political, economic, and technological. So it is with policing research. We begin by sketching out where we think the practice of policing is heading, and what we need to do differently, so as to get to a roughly envisioned future ethically and in good order. A police presence at all places at all times being impossible, the practical issue is where and when to place officers or their technological surrogates. The chapter will consider optimised distribution of effort and resource, given the central aim of fairness in the distribution of crime harm. We will illustrate current levels of inequality of victimisation, and claim that reducing the current concentration, at individual and area levels, should be an explicit underpinning vision for policing. We briefly review the relevant literature and its implications.