Small Worlds of Crime and Criminal Justice Interventions: Discovering Crime Hot Spots

This chapter describes how I first came to envision crime hot spots. My interest in hot spots of crime goes back to qualitative work that I conducted before finishing my dissertation at Yale. Indeed, one might say that my pursuit of what was later to be termed crime and place or the criminology of place came as an accident. In my acceptance speech for the Stockholm Prize in 2010, I noted, paraphrasing a well-known book at the time (titled All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten; Fulghum, 2004), that everything I needed to know about hot spots of crime I learned in the 72nd precinct in New York City (1984–1985).