Patterns of crime and universities: A spatial analysis of burglary, robbery, and motor vehicle theft patterns surrounding universities in Ottawa.

This thesis explores the spatial distribution of crime in Ottawa, Canada in 2006. Crime pattern theory provides the theoretical framework for examining the relationship between the rates of burglary, robbery, and motor vehicle theft and the two universities, University of Ottawa and Carleton University. This thesis uses ArcView 3.3 software to geocode and spatially join the crime and census data, and uses GeoDa 0.9.5-i software to conduct a spatial regression procedure that accounts for spatial autocorrelation between the crime rates and socio-demographic characteristics at the dissemination area level. This thesis finds support for crime pattern theory and the geometric theory of crime, as universities are the strongest predictors of the rates of burglary and motor vehicle theft. This thesis also finds some support for both social disorganization theory and routine activity theory as a number of the expected relationships between the socio-demographic and socio-economic variables and crime are observed.