The Geography of Crime; Contextualising ‘Place’ and ‘Space’ in the Geography of Crime and encouraging inclusiveness

The Geography of Crime has narrow empirical spatial analysis and pattern exploration outlooks with minimal developmental history. This thesis responds to the question of whether the contemporary geography of Crime ethos is broad enough to facilitate high value geographical perspective knowledge generation. Two disparate topics, spatial ‘near repeat’ (NR) offending and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) are critically examined and synthesised, interacting with a further topic of the integrity of Police Recorded Crime (PRC) data. Detailed NR analysis covers an early urban preventative initiative and robust identification of NR patterns in individual offending, requiring new analytical frameworks and methodologies and an original contribution to the analysis of NR. That study, unique in nature and subject, reveals sustained but individualistic NR behaviour by serial offenders and suggests crime Pattern Theory linkage. CPTED papers probe development over time and generate a robust evidence based action framework, positively linking academic and practitioner fields. PRC data integrity is questioned through a development timeline and use of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) submissions gathering time separated PRC data. Results establish questionable police records management practices that negatively influences PRC data integrity. Research use of the FOIA, being an original contribution to knowledge, is also able to provide research methodology guidelines in its use for social scientists. Work follows opposing ontologies but critical examination exposes in-depth linkage to conceptual geographic concepts of ‘place’ and ‘space’, the geography outlook emphasised as the entwining position of the authors study of crime. It brings to the fore how mixed themes can engage in the generation of new knowledge but that the contemporary ethos of the Geography of Crime is at risk of being too narrow in what appears to have become a predominantly locational quantitative approach and as such can lead to attenuated cross-disciplinary inclusivity and knowledge generation.