Neighbourhood characteristics and the distribution of crime on the Island of Montréal

The results show that the distances travelled by the persons charged are relatively short, and that these distances vary with the type of offence, the age of the persons charged and their relationship with the victim. [...] In the Canadian context, the study of neighbourhood characteristics and the distribution of crime in Winnipeg (Fitzgerald, Wisener and Savoie, 2004) showed that crime was concentrated in the city centre, which occupies a relatively small proportion of the total geographic area of that city. [...] However, the two measures yield the same general assessment of the trip length according to the characteristics of the person charged and the type of offence. [...] The presence of a strong autocorrelation is detected in the residuals of the OLS regression models for Montréal, that is a Moran’s I statistic of 0.14 (p<0.001) in the case of violent crimes and 0.24 (p<0.001) in the case of property crime. [...] The spatial autoregressive model gives a squared correlation coefficient of 0.60 (p<0.05) between actual values for the neighbourhood crime rates and the predicted values in the case of violent crimes, and of 0.61 (p<0.05) in the case of property crimes.