Report

Point-Level Analysis of Crime in Khayelitsha: A Critical Review

This report analyses point-level data on murders and robberies for a high-crime community in South Africa to discern spatial trends. It explores the data at a granular level to understand the nature of several hotspots. Issues with the quality of police data are discussed, both as limitations for analysis, and in terms of the need for more accurate and readily available pointlevel data for ongoing crime analysis and response. This report focuses primarily on the spatial and visual depiction of crime concentrations and it attempts to for these concentrations over the 10-year period. As such, detailed temporal analysis is beyond the scope of this report but could be undertaken in future research. After identifying hotspots using various methods, an inspection of several of these hotspots is conducted to understand what is happening, both in the data and, through satellite imagery, on the ground in terms of the built environment. Issues with the way crime data has been geocoded become evident and these are visualised and discussed.