Combining police perceptions with police records of serious crime areas: a modelling approach

The paper investigates the location of serious crime neighbourhoods in Sheffield, England, in 1998 on the basis of two sources of data: senior police officer perceptions of where such neighbourhoods are and the evidence that is contained in the police's own database of recorded crime. We report the results of modelling these two spatial distributions by using 2001 census data on output areas. We also demonstrate how expert knowledge might be combined with the evidence that is contained in large georeferenced databases. We conclude with an evaluation of the use of model-based approaches to identifying high crime areas. The purpose of the paper is to go beyond descriptive mapping of crime data and to explore how to combine, in a formal way, different types of knowledge in the analysis of crime and disorder maps.