TY - JOUR
AU1 - Mazeika, David
AU2 - Summerton, David
AU3 - 
AB - <jats:sec>
<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title>
<jats:p>The purpose of this paper is to better understand the variability in burglary geocoding positional accuracy between United States Census Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER)-based street geocoding and results produced using reference data made publicly available by Google.</jats:p>
</jats:sec>
<jats:sec>
<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title>
<jats:p>This research compares the Euclidian distance between ground-truthed burglaries and results produced using two different geocoding reference data sets: TIGER-based street geocoding and publicly available data within Google Earth. <jats:italic>T</jats:italic>-tests and <jats:italic>z</jats:italic>-tests are used to discern whether positional errors are statistically significant.</jats:p>
</jats:sec>
<jats:sec>
<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title>
<jats:p>Both within suburban and urban jurisdictions, Google outperformed street geocoding in terms of positional accuracy. Positional errors on average were 1/4th as large for Google in a suburban setting and 1/5th as large in an urban setting compared to street geocoding.</jats:p>
</jats:sec>
<jats:sec>
<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Practical implications</jats:title>
<jats:p>Police departments that are relying on street geocoding techniques may achieve improved spatial precision by using Google’s reference data if they contain parcel-level information. Moreover, relying on less precise spatial referencing methods may place burglaries in locations where the events do not actually occur or cluster.</jats:p>
</jats:sec>
<jats:sec>
<jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title>
<jats:p>This is the first analysis of law enforcement data to examine the positional accuracy of geocoded offense data using Google Earth compared to the commonly used street geocoding method of interpolation.</jats:p>
</jats:sec>
TI - The impact of geocoding method on the positional accuracy of residential burglaries reported to police
JF - Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management
DO - 10.1108/pijpsm-03-2016-0048
DA - 2017-05-15
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/crossref/the-impact-of-geocoding-method-on-the-positional-accuracy-of-hkTALG9c37
SP - 459
EP - 470
VL - 40
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -