Micro-places, multi-level frameworks, and modeling the spatial granularity of crime

This chapter examines research on the spatial granularity of crime patterns. Due to the malleability of the concept of “place” there are often multiple viable spatial units of analysis researchers could select to analyze a crime problem. Therefore, researchers must address a fundamental challenge of spatial analyses and make difficult decisions about what place is the most appropriate to tell their story of where crime happens. This chapter is divided into two general sections to address this issue. The first section addresses spatial granularity through the perspective of micro-places. The second section addresses recent research on multi-level frameworks to examine spatial granularity. The chapter concludes with a synthesis of these discussions to help offer a final assessment of the key questions we proposed about the spatial granularity of crime.