Predicting crime using street structure

We’ve talked about how crime can spread through time and space. However, we know that the time it can take to get from one point to another in a city is not just down to the distance between these points, at least not when measured as the crow flies. The street connections between those two points have a substantial influence on this timing.

In this video, Toby Davies explains how taking the street networks of a city into account can greatly improve our understanding of how crime spreads. He also gives an excellent and accessible introduction to a very important concept in understanding all sorts of networks: “betweenness”.

Toby Davies is a research associate in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London. He studies crime using approaches from complexity science, addressing problems such as the influence of street networks on crime, and the evolution of large-scale riots. He has collaborated with a number of police forces throughout the UK, and his work has been featured on the BBC.

You can watch the whole of Toby’s presentation “Incorporating street network effects in models of crime” on YouTube (21:49).