A new metric of crime hotspots for Operational Policing Monsuru Adepeju

This study examines the existing metrics used in evaluating the effectiveness of area-based crime hotspots for operational policing. We identified some of the limitations of the metric (ie Area-to-Perimeter (AP) ratio) used for measuring compactness of hotspots and then proposed a new improved metric called “Clumpiness Index (CI)”. The case study of London Metropolitan police crime dataset features the prediction of 3 different crime types using two different crime predictive methods. The effectiveness of the hotspots was then measured using both AP ratio and CI. The comparison of the results clearly shows that CI is a better metric for measuring the effectiveness of crime hotspots for operational policing.