From Beats to Tracts: A Remote Sensing Approach to the Interpolation of Crime Data

In this article, the author addresses the spatial incompatibility between different types of data that is commonly faced in crime analysis research. Socioeconomic variables have been proved valuable in explaining crime behaviors and in predicting crime activities. However, socioeconomic data and crime statistics are usually collected and aggregated at different spatial zonations of geographical space, making the integration and analysis of these data difficult. Simple areal weighting interpolation technique, although frequently employed, often leads to unsatisfactory results due to the fact that most types of crime do not distributed evenly across space. Using 2007 burglary crime in Houston, Texas, as an example, the author illustrates a remote sensing approach to interpolating crime statistics from police beat enumeration district used by Houston Police Department to census tract defined by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.