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The Park Place Economist

Abstract

This study intends to use these past contributions as a framework for a gravity model of crime in the Town of Normal, Illinois from the years 2004 to 2012. Following Smith (1976), Elffers et al. (2008), and Walker (2009), data has been gathered from the local police department and includes a variety of violent crime and property crime. Following Elffers et al.’s (2008) analysis, geographical area and a measure of the residential housing stock will be used as control variables; similarly to the approach followed by Smith (1974), Elffers et al. (2008) and Kahane (2013), the distance between police sub-beats in Normal is approximated by estimating the geographical distance between centroids. Because each of the aforementioned analyses found distance to be a reliable predictor of the concentration of crime across towns and countries, this study expects to establish the same relationship.

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