关键词: 财产犯罪, 空间分布, 犯罪热点, 犯罪因子, 长春市

Abstract:

Based on the crime data in 2008 collected at the police-precinct level from the Public Security Bureau of Changchun, this article firstly analyzes the spatial pattern of property crimes in this typical city with a population around 3×10⁶ in Northeast China. An approximate structure of layers was shown, which means more crimes in central areas and fewer crimes outside. After further investigation on the land use and function of the precincts with higher property crime rates, it is found that the busy areas such as the major commercial areas and the transport centers tend to possess higher probability of property crime occurrences. According to the routine activities theory which has been applied by western researchers in plenty of practical studies, the places where most of the opportunities of convergence in space and time of likely offenders, suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians against crime concentrate will suffer higher risks of criminal activities. The busy areas in Changchun possess more properties and usually gather more people for working, shopping, entertaining and so on, which means more opportunities for the potential offenders to commit property crimes with less chances to get arrested. The hotspots of property crime rates in Changchun are identified using spatial analysis, which provides us with statistical support for the assumption that criminal activities tend to cluster somewhere. This phenomenon may due to the existence of spatial spillover or diffusion. Finally, we conduct regression analysis to examine the relationships between property crime rates and demographic, socioeconomic as well as land use factors according to the relevant western theories. The model built in this article can explain more than 70% of the variation of property crime rates in Changchun at more than 95% confidence level. The result reveals that the property crime rates in Changchun in 2008 were affected by the factors of population density, employment activity, commercial area, service activities, transport center and the proportion of young people, which supports the basic ideas of routine activities to some extent. The fact that the population density exhibits the strongest effect on the property crime rates suggests that concentration of population increases the number of offenders which in turn increases the property crime risks in the city. As a typical city in China, Changchun displays a common structure of population distribution in the current urbanization process. The degree of concentration of population is much higher in the central areas which usually have better accessibility and more commercial or recreational land use. In combination with the positive effect of the commercial land use on property crime rates which has been indicated in the model, the structure of population distribution can provide us with a convincing explanation for the spatial pattern of property crimes in Changchun to a great degree. Though the proportion of young people shows an opposite relationship to what the western researches have found, it is understandable when we take the special context of China into account. As for the social disorganization theory which is another classic theory in criminal geography in western countries, the research does not lend enough support for it, because the variables (proportion of non-residential population and housing size per person) are not significant in the model. For further understanding, specific analyses are still needed based on the practical situation in Changchun.

Key words: property crimes, spatial distribution, criminal hotspots, criminal factors, Changchun