Study Of Crime Geography Of The City Center

Crime is always a great threat to urban security. To defend urban security, it is quite important to understand the criminal geography in city centres, the core areas of cities. But in China, there are few geographic studies on urban crime, especially these on crime in city centres. This thesis chooses two city centres of different types: Lujiazui financial district, which is a centre of Shanghai and Chuansha town centre, which is a sub-centre of Pudong New Area, analyzes the temporal and spatial distribution of theft (including pick-pocketing, theft of goods in vehicles, motor vehicle theft, non-motor vehicle theft and burglary) and robbery-snatch, and manage to support the police on crime prevention from the aspect of urban environment.The study is supported by the previous studies of criminal geography and theories of criminal behaviour and adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods. First, the concentration and dispersion tendency of different types of crime are analyzed and compared. Then, the temporal and spatial distribution of different types of crime is studied. The analysis of temporal distribution studies the monthly, daily and hourly distribution of crime. The analysis of spatial distribution is the key component of study which explores the land use distribution and hot spots of crime. The study discovers that some criminal characteristics are similar between Lujiazui financial district and Chuansha town centre while some are different. Each type of crime has its own temporal pattern, a large amount or high density of occurrence in certain land uses, obvious hot spots which have much higher density of occurrence, as well as various relationships with urban environment. Finally, based on these findings and the working experience, the author gives some suggestions on crime prevention from the perspective of urban environment.