Substantial research suggests that a burglary event is a useful predictor of burglaries to the same or nearby properties in the near future. To date, the research that has suggested this predictive quality has been based on studies that have focused on crime patterns in western industrialised countries, such as the UK, USA and Australia. These studies have in turn informed the design of effective burglary reduction programmes that have a specific focus towards countering the risk of repeats and near repeats. This current study adds to the existing research knowledge by examining whether patterns of burglary repeats and near repeats are evident in Belo Horizonte, a large Brazilian city. Domestic dwellings in Brazilian cities, as typified by those in Belo Horizonte, are quite different to dwellings in western countries—many city-dwelling Brazilians live in apartments in high rise buildings, most houses and apartment blocks are surrounded by high perimeter fencing, and a reasonable proportion of dwellings are irregular self-constructed houses. As a consequence, a different infrastructure of domestic living may result in differences in patterns of domestic burglary when compared to patterns in western countries. The research identifies that the extent of repeat and near repeat patterns in the city of Belo Horizonte are lower than those in comparable western urban contexts. We discuss the implications of these findings and how they impact on the translating of practice on crime prevention and crime prediction to the urban Latin American context.

Most research that has examined the international variation in homicide levels has focused on structural variables, with the suggestion that socio-economic development operates as a cure for violence. In Latin America, development has occurred, but high homicide levels remain, suggesting the involvement of other influencing factors. We posit that government effectiveness and corruption control may contribute to explaining the variation in homicide levels, and in particular in the Latin America region. Our results show that social and economic structural variables are useful but are not conclusive in explaining the variation in homicide levels and that the relationship between homicide, government effectiveness, and corruption control was significant and highly pronounced for countries in the Latin American region. The findings highlight the importance of supporting institutions in improving their effectiveness in Latin America so that reductions in homicide (and improvements in citizen security in general) can be achieved.

Crime script analysis is becoming an increasingly used approach for examining organized crime. Crime scripts can use data from multiple sources, including open sources of intelligence (OSINT). Limited guidance exists, however, on how to populate the content of a crime script with data, and validate these data. This results in crime scripts being generated intuitively, restricts them from being scrutinised for their quality, and limits the opportunity to combine or compare crime scripts. We introduce a practical process for populating the content of a crime script that involves simple coding procedures and uses document analysis to quality assure data that are extracted from open sources. We illustrate the process with the example of theft of oil from pipelines in Mexico committed by organized crime groups. The structured methodical process we introduce produces a crime script of high quality, helps to improve the systematic analysis of decision-making performed by members of organized crime groups, and can improve the identification of opportunities for crime control.

Research on crime concentration at micro-places has had a very western-industrialised focus. In this paper we provide results on crime concentration for 42 cities in Latin America. The results suggest that crime is concentrated at higher levels in Latin American cities than in western-industrialised contexts. Reasons for this do not appear to be related to population size, average street length, numbers of crimes or crime rates. The results offer an indication of the crime reduction opportunities that could come from the implementation of programs that are precisely targeted to the micro-places where crime has been observed to highly concentrate, such as hot spot policing.

Since December 2008, police forces in the UK have published crime statistics using an online crime mapping tool (www.police.uk). The drivers behind this were to help improve the credibility and confidence that the public had in police-recorded crime levels, address perceptions of crime, promote community engagement and empowerment, and support greater public service transparency and accountability. This article captures the policy rationale behind this initiative, and draws together the research evidence on its impact. We argue that many of the original objectives relating to improving engagement and empowerment have yet to be realized, poor cartographic discipline has led to misinterpretation and confusion, and that the initiative instead has primarily become a tool for promoting political transparency. We suggest that future focus should be on improving the quality and cartographic visualization of the published information alongside the integration of social media functionality to enrich local dialogue on crime issues.