After a crime, nearby properties face temporarily elevated risk, so offences cluster in space and time like a communicable process.
Analyses of burglary and shootings find excess risk within a few hundred metres and a few weeks of a prior event, above what stable hot spots alone predict. The pattern supports an offender-behaviour account, in which a successful offence prompts return to similar nearby targets, and it makes short-term geographic forecasting tractable in a way long-run risk maps are not.
In practice
- A street where one car is broken into loses three more within a fortnight, all within sight of the first.
- A fraud attempt against one branch is followed by attempts on its neighbours before the alert circulates.