ABSTRACT
Much has happened since the appearance of an earlier version of this chapter in the 2005 Handbook of Crime Prevention. Acquisitive property crime has continued to fall but other new types of offence have begun to emerge. Examples include identity theft, internet fraud, cybercrime, inappropriate uses of social media (e.g. ‘sexting’ and revenge porn), slavery and human trafficking, hostile reconnaissance, violent extremism and the apparently increasing threat from terrorist attacks. Big data has arrived opening up new opportunities for studying consumer behaviour, people’s mobility and the estimation of population fluctuations by time of day, thereby providing improved dominators for crime rates in non-residential areas. Improvements in the processing speed, memory, data storage and capabilities of computers, along with advances in analytical techniques have made the prediction of crime patterns possible and ‘prospective hot-spotting’ a reality.
