I have a new working paper out with Cory Haberman, Modeling the Spatial Patterns of Intra-Day Crime Trends. Below is the abstract:

Several prior studies have found that despite theoretical expectations otherwise, facilities (such as on-premise alcohol outlets) have consistent effects on crime regardless of time of the day (Bernasco et al., 2017; Haberman & Ratcliffe, 2015). We explain these results by failure to account for the regular background wave of crime, which results from ubiquitous patterns of human routine activities. Using eight years of data on assaults and robberies in Seattle (WA), we demonstrate the regularity of the within-day crime wave for all areas of the city. Then using models to predict when a crime will most likely occur, we demonstrate how schools and on-premise alcohol outlets cause bumps in the background wave at particular times of the day, such as when school dismisses. But those bumps dissipate quite rapidly in space, and are relatively small compared to the amplitude of the regular background wave of crime. Although facilities have theoretical times in which they should have a greater influence on crime patterns, they are situated within a community of other human activity uses, making it difficult to uniquely identify their effects separately from other aspects of the built environment.

And here is a joyplot showing the changes in the hour of day wave depending on how close robberies are to a public high school or middle school:

You can see bumps very nearby schools at 7 am, then around noon and throughout the later afternoon, but are smoothed out when you get to around 2,000 feet away from schools.

The idea behind this paper is that several recent articles have not found much of a conditional relationship between crime generators and time of day. For example you would think bars only effect crime at nighttime when most people are at the bar, but several recent articles found the time of day does not make much of a difference (Bernasco et al., 2017; Haberman & Ratcliffe, 2015). We hypothesize this is because of the background wave of crime per hour of the day is much larger in magnitude than any local factor. An intuitive reason for this is that a place never has just a bar in isolation, there are other local land uses nearby that influence criminal patterns. You can see places nearby crime generators cause slight bumps in the background wave, but they are tiny compared to the overall amplitude of the general within day crime wave.

The article has a link to data and code to reproduce the findings. As always if you have feedback I am all ears.