Variations in temporal stability of crime patterns in Oslo

Annica Allvin, PhD-student, Norwegian Police University College
Torbjørn Skardhamar, Professor, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo

That crime is not randomly distributed across place is an important finding to our understanding of crime patterns and for crime prevention purposes. The crime-and-place literature shows how some hot spots might be considered “chronic”. Overall, scholars confirm that Weisburd’s (2015) “law of crime concentration” holds for different times, places and measurements – although some variability is found and the same scholars highlights crime patterns and their temporal stability are highly contextual and crime specific.

The Nordic countries represent a different context from most previous research, and there are not many studies on geographical patterns of crime from these countries. In this paper, we examine the concentration and stability of crime in Oslo, Norway. The data is on reported crimes to the police from 2000 to 2018 at 100 meter grid. We examine place-based trajectories for Oslo while assessing the robustness of the results by comparing several methods for longitudinal clustering.