The Law of Crime Concentration
Crime is not spread evenly. Wherever researchers have looked, they have found the same pattern: a small share of places account for a large share of offences.
The finding traces back to Lawrence Sherman’s work in Minneapolis in 1989, which showed that around 3% of addresses generated more than half of all calls for police service. David Weisburd later formalised it as the “law of crime concentration at places”, proposing that roughly 5% of street segments in a city account for about half of its crime.
This is more than a curiosity for two reasons.
First: stability. The hot spots do not wander. Weisburd’s Seattle study tracked street segments over sixteen years and found the high-crime places largely stayed high-crime, and the quiet ones stayed quiet, even as the city’s overall crime rate fell substantially. Concentration is a fact about particular places, not a statistical accident that reshuffles each year.
The second is that it holds at a very fine grain. Concentration is much sharper at the level of the street segment or the individual address than at the level of a ward or a borough. The maps here work at ward level, so what you are seeing actually understates the true concentration rather than exaggerating it.
This matters for what police do. If offending were evenly spread, patrol would be a numbers game and enforcement would be whack-a-mole. Because it is concentrated and stable, resource can be targeted. The evidence on hot spot policing is unusually strong for criminology: systematic reviews consistently find that targeting these areas gives you big crime reductions. And contrary to what you might imagine, pushing down the crime hotspot doesn’t work like a half-inflated balloon, popping up somewhere else. Crime researchers more often find a diffusion of benefit into surrounding streets than displacement into them.
This is exactly the principle behind my February 2025 report on tackling phone theft. Target the hotspots, the West End in particular, and crime will come down. That is exactly what has now happened.