Crime seasonality and its variations across space

Investigations into the seasonal patterns of crime date back 180 years to the beginnings of spatial criminology. This original research by Adolphe Quetelet, and much subsequent work, has shown that various crimes have a seasonal component, but the strength and timing of the respective seasonalities vary by crime type. In this paper, we first investigate the existence of seasonality for a number of different crime types, but also the variations of seasonality across space. We find that not only do the various crime types exhibit seasonal patterns, but those seasonal patterns have relatively distinct spatial patterns. This has implications for theory and policy.