Analysis of the Crime rate in Poland in Spatial and Temporal Terms

The paper evaluates the crime rate in Poland in spatial and temporal terms. The methods of spatial statistics were employed to identify the clusters of areas with above-average intensity of the selected categories of crimes. Poviats were divided into four groups according to their location in the quadrants of Moran scatter plot. The spatial lag model was used to identify certain spatial relationships between general crime rate and the selected factors recognised in the literature as factors that affect crime. The initial set of potential independent variables was selected arbitrarily. Then Ward's method was used to reduce the number of correlated variables. The following factors were found to significantly explain spatial variation of crime rate in the poviats of Poland: the intensity of crime in the surrounding areas, urbanisation, percentage of single-person households, divorce’s coefficient, gross migration per 1000 population and provided accommodation per 1000 population. The analysis also involved the structure and dynamics of crimes recorded in Poland. It was pointed out that the changes in law, the development of information technology and the increase the level of education significantly affected the number and structure of the crimes recorded in police statistics.