Exploring associations between streetscape factors and crime behaviors using Google Street View images

Abstract

Understanding the influencing mechanism of the urban streetscape on crime is fairly important to crime prevention and urban management. Recently, the development of deep learning technology and big data of street view images, makes it possible to quantitatively explore the relationship between streetscape and crime. This study computed eight streetscape indexes of the street built environment using Google Street View images firstly. Then, the association between the eight indexes and recorded crime events was revealed with a poisson regression model and a geographically weighted poisson regression model. An experiment was conducted in downtown and uptown Manhattan, New York. Global regression results show that the influences of Motorization Index on crimes are significant and positive, while the effects of the Light View Index and Green View Index on crimes depend heavily on the socio-economic factors. From a local perspective, the Pedestrian Space Index, Green View Index, Light View IndexandMotorization Index have a significant spatial influence on crimes, while the same visual streetscape factors have different effects on different streets due to the combination differences of socio-economic, cultural and streetscape elements. The key streetscape elements of a given street that affect a specific criminal activity can be identified according to the strength of the association. The results provide both theoretical and practical implications for crime theories and crime prevention efforts.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

crime / Google Street View / streetscape / spatial analysis / geographically weighted poisson regression

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61872050, No. 62172066), the Chongqing Basic and Frontier Research Program (cstc2018jcyjAX0551), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2018CDJSK03XK01), and the Chongqing Technology Innovation and Application Development Key Project (ctsc2019jscx-gksbX0066).

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