Hot Spots and Cold Comfort: the Importance of Having a Working Thermometer

The effective deployment of police resources is heavily dependent on the quality of analysis available. Over the past decade, the term "hot spots" has come to be commonplace in policing, and it is rare to find a police agency that cannot or does not identify spatial clustering of criminal incidents. Equally rare is the consideration of any other type of clustering. The following study highlights the existence of other dimensions that may provide more accurate tactical directives for the deployment of resources ("hot groups") or at least qualify the spatial clustering ("hot times").