P. Jeffrey Brantingham: UCLA Department of Anthropology

It is well known that victims of both violent and property crime experience an increased risk of being victimized again, especially during a brief interval of time following the initial event. Ethnographic evidence suggests, in the case of property crime, that offenders seek out previous targets to replicate previous successes. In the case of violent crime, by contrast, retribution plays an important role in ramping-up and sustaining cycles of violence. Self-exciting point process models are used to study the time-course of burglary in Los Angeles, violent acts and reprisals between rival gangs in Los Angeles and insurgent attacks in Iraq. Self-excitation appears to be a generic statistical structure for crime hotspot formation across most, if not all types of crime.

This work is a collaborative effort with Andrea Bertozzi, George Mohler, Martin Short and Erik Lewis (UCLA Math), as well as George Tita (UC Irvine Criminology) and the Los Angeles Police Department. The work was supported by the US National Science Foundation.

*(Co-Sponsored by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA)