犯罪地理国际研究进展

犯罪地理学是犯罪学和地理学研究的交叉学科。近30 年来, 随着GIS 技术的发展, 国外犯罪地理学在研究内容和研究方法上发生了许多转变。从5 个方面简述了国外犯罪地理研究的发展:①解释理论, 简述了不同理论的不足及发展;②犯罪活动空间分布, 全局关系和局域关系上犯罪活动空间分布的判别和可视化;③计量模型, 空间依赖和空间异质效应的计量;④虚拟犯罪, 犯罪活动预测的地理计算;⑤研究尺度, 从大尺度到小尺度的转变。最后总结了地理学对犯罪学研究的贡献, 并提出了国外的发展对国内研究的借鉴。

A Review on the Foreign Criminal Geography Research

Urban crime, one of the most important problems affecting people’s life, has strong geographic color. Criminal geography study is multi-discipline research concerning criminology, urban social geography and other related subjects. This paper reviews the development of foreign criminal geography in five aspects. (1) The development in theory. Social disorganization theory is the first to focus on communities as a relevant geographical unit of inquiry. It explains higher rates of delinquency through the structural characteristics of neighborhoods, including low economic status, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity. But, it does not tell us how environmental characteristics are linked to individual action. Routine activity theory originally identifies three elements necessary for a crime to occur, a motivated offender, a suitable target and the lack of a capable guardian. The rational choice perspective addresses how offenders make the decision to offend under the rational choice perspective, offenders use a form of“bounded rationality”when making the decision to commit a specific offense. They explain the interaction between individual characteristics and environment, but, individual characteristics and experiences are treated equally to crime causation. Situational action theory aims to provide a truly ecological perspective in the analysis and study of moral action and crime. It is a general theory that seeks to integrate personal and environmental explanatory perspectives within the framework of a situational action theory. (2) Visual criminal behavior. How to describe the spatial criminal behavior is the first step of criminal geography. (3) Criminal pattern. Criminals do not move randomly through their environment. How do we reveal its geographic law? (4) Spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity. The presence of spatial autocorrelation may lead to biased and inconsistent regression model parameter estimates and increase the risk of a type I error in statistics. Using the spatial weights matrix W and putting WY, WX and Wε into the regression model is the solvable method. Then, GWR can solve spatial heterogeneity. (5) Computational experiment. What can the computational experiment do for the criminal geography research? (6) Changing in criminal geography. The development in GIS presents a new tool for a better understanding of criminal activity. The criminal geography is undergone a process from motive to action, and from macro-level to micro-level. Some fields in criminal geography have expanded so much. The rapid development of criminal geography in the Western countries will provide reference for similar studies in China.