Social Sciences, Vol. 14, Pages 314: Before You Are a Victim in Mexico: Police Strategies to Prevent Commercial Burglary Using Public Data

Social Sciences doi: 10.3390/socsci14050314

Authors:
Antonio Petz
Miguel Alejandro Flores

In a country where the majority of crimes remain unreported, uninvestigated, and unpunished, law enforcement faces considerable challenges in obtaining high-quality data that are consistent, reliable, and timely to effectively plan and deploy their strategies. By leveraging publicly available data, this paper identifies high-vulnerability areas for commercial burglary within the Metropolitan Area of Monterrey, utilizing a variable that incorporates the key dimensions of routine activity theory in criminology. This is accomplished by constructing an index through principal component analysis, followed by spatially grouping the resulting variable using the global indicator of spatial association (LISA). The results allow us to focus strategies to combat commercial burglary on 16.82% of the studied territory and establish an order of priorities to address the most vulnerable areas one by one. Also, the results allow us to implement prevention actions in broader zones by generating clusters around areas that share similar attributes.

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Antonio Petz www.mdpi.com