"Do the recorded victims and offenders of police recorded crimes involving firearms live in the same places?"

The question I am addressing in this post is "Do the recorded victims and offenders of police recorded crimes involving firearms live in the same places?" Then I go on tho answer similar questions relating to deprivation and crime venue.

First a few details about my data set. I have been using the police recorded crime data set in my recent posts about firearm related crime.  "police recorded" means that it is only a subset of the total occurrence of crimes involving firearms. I can make no guess, comment or observation on whether this subset is typical or representative of the total. Thus "police recorded crime" part of the question. Police are good at recording victims and their addresses. There are only 8% of victims without a grid reference address. The details of a suspect or a person who has been arrested for an offence, an accused is far less complete due to police only detecting a percentage of crimes. Thus the question having "recorded" twice in it. I am using offender as shorthand for suspect or accused.

Next thing is; I am not looking at individual crimes, I am looking at all the crimes together. So if offenders and victims do live near each other it does not mean that they have been involved in the same crime, though it is possible. What I have done is correlate the location counts of victim and offender addresses at the different  scales I have been mapping. Borough, Ward and Grid Square. The results are as follows;

• Borough  -  0.95 correlation meaning that the boroughs with high number of victims have high number of offenders - an almost perfect correlation
• Ward - 0.68 correlation meaning that wards with high number of victims have high number of offenders - a significant correlation
• Grid - 0.30  correlation meaning that grid squares with high number of victims have high number of offenders - but this is not a strong correlation meaning there are many exceptions to this trend.

What can be inferred from this? It can said to a high degree of confidence that victims and offenders live in the same general areas as it each but not necessarily in exactly the same places. In London millionaires can live close to those claiming benefits so there is diversity in housing even at a grid square scale.

The table above gives the correlation results when victim and offenders address locations are compared with the Index of Multiple Deprivations (IMD) scores. I have discussed the IMD in detail on this blog so I will not explain further here. Just to give a word of caution, the spatial scales I am using are not those that the IMD was calculated at so there is a degree of inaccuracy that could be present at Ward and Borough level, though not much as they are adding LSOA scores together and taking the mean; the grid square IMD score is very much an approximation as I have discussed previously. This probably explained the Grid Square correlations show a higher correlation for victims where the other two show a higher correlation for offenders

Now this table showing correlations between the victim's and offender's addresses (in bulk) and the venue of the crimes (in bulk). It show that on a local level - grid square and ward the location of crimes are nearer victim's homes but at a slightly more general level - borough the trend is reverse. All these correlation are high though.