Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-7-2018
Abstract
Progress in surveillance technology has led to the development of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems in cities around the world. Cameras are considered instrumental in crime reduction, yet existing research does not unambiguously answer the question whether installing them affects the number of crimes committed. The quasi-experimental method usually applied to evaluate CCTV systems’ effectiveness faces difficulties with data quantity and quality. Data quantity has a bearing on the number of crimes that can be conclusively inferred using the experimental procedure. Data quality affects the level of crime data aggregation. The lack of the exact location of a crime incident in the form of a street address or geographic coordinates hinders the selection procedure of experimental and control areas. In this paper we propose an innovative method of dealing with data limitations in a quasi-experimental study on the effectiveness of CCTV systems in Poland. As police data on crime incidents are geocoded onto a neighborhood or a street, we designed a method to overcome this drawback by applying similarity measures to time series and landscape metrics. The method makes it possible to determine experimental (test) and control areas which are necessary to conduct the study.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
Number
534
Recommended Citation
Dabrowski, A., Matczak, P., Wójtowicz, A., & Leitner, M. (2018). Identification of experimental and control areas for CCTV effectiveness assessment—the issue of spatially aggregated data. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 7 (12) https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi7120471