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Abstract
This research set out to explore the influence alcohol outlets and temperature had on violent crime in a small city. I choose Carbondale, Illinois as study area because of the high transient to resident population proportion. I gathered violent crime data from the Carbondale City Police Department and Southern Illinois University Carbondale Police Department, for period January 1, 2003 to December 31, 2006. I extracted community characteristics by running a factor analysis with varimax rotation on selected sociodemographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Using Geographically Weighted Regression Poisson, I modeled the census block level crime rates as dependent on community characteristics and alcohol outlets. I then modeled census blocks collected monthly crime level as dependent on community characteristics, alcohol outlets, and temperature. I found that violent crime concentrated mostly in the early morning and on weekends, and spatially focused around eastern Carbondale. The violent crime model exhibited strong spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Alcohol outlets exerted positive influence, while temperature exerted a very small positive influence that was dependent on month and location. The major recommendations of this research is that police should focus their efforts at certain times of day for certain neighborhoods.