The Geography of Juvenile Crime Place Trajectories

Abstract

The crime drop of the 1990s has been the subject of a large body of research, which has suggested juvenile crime was the major source of this decline. However, a satisfactory explanation for the crime drop remains elusive. While most of the work has focused on longitudinal studies of the development of delinquency in juveniles and macro-level patterns of juvenile crime, recent empirical and theoretical developments indicate that the processes driving crime trends may be operating at micro-level places. Thus, an examination of micro-level places may hold clues to understanding the crime drop. This research builds on two earlier studies in Seattle, Washington, that used trajectory analysis to identify temporal changes in crime at street blocks over a fourteen-year time period. Specifically, this research used a variety of spatial techniques to describe the distribution of the street blocks in each trajectory and their relationship to one another.