Crime Mapping

Mapmaking has been extraordinarily influential in the way that social scientists, state officials, and the general public understand crime. For well over a century, maps of crime have been used by criminologists, sociologists, and urban scholars to explain and anticipate various types of crime patterns. This article explores a brief history of crime mapping from the perspective of critical human geography. It shows how material conditions, political projects, and social practices continuously shape the production of crime maps. In doing so it demonstrates how the spatial knowledge we gain from crime maps is always produced from particular viewpoints, with particular ends in mind. The goal of the article is thus to provoke new ways of conceptualizing relations between crime rates and urban space.