Criminologist Rene Cummings has delivered a sharp critique of crime-fighting strategies in Trinidad and Tobago that label entire communities as “hot-spots” or “zones.”
In a Facebook post, Cummings warned that such approaches are unscientific, stigmatizing, and are counterproductive to genuine crime reduction.
She said decades of research have been ignored in favour of flawed crime-control narratives.
“Whole communities cannot be classified as “hot spots.” Hot spots are micro-places, specific addresses, parcels, intersections, street segments, and small grid cells, pinpricks on a map where crime concentrates well above baseline,” Cummings stated.
“The “heat” in hot-spot mapping is not a moral temperature, not a social verdict. It is a visualization of spatial concentration,” she added.
Cummings noted that when law enforcement agencies in Trinidad and Tobago began referring to entire communities as hot spots years ago, she raised public concerns over the dangers of using the term.
She says the terminology has now been changes from “hot spots” to “zones” but the underlying logic is the same.
Cummings says that criminological research, especially environmental criminology and hot-spot research has revealed a different picture.
“Crime patterns are shaped by opportunity structures, routine activities, situational conditions, and place-based dynamics. Crime adheres to environments. It follows pathways. It settles into corners, corridors, nodes, and street segments. It does not emanate from the souls of communities,” she stated.
Cummings criticized governments past and present for their approach to crime-fighting.
“We continue to witness a stubborn resistance to well-established, evidence-based models, paired with a troubling willingness to substitute stereotype, myth, and pseudo-science for rigorous analysis,” she stated.
Cummings stated that effective crime-fighting is about disciplined focus.
“Effective crime reduction requires precision. It requires place-based analysis. It requires evidence-driven intervention. Not labels,” she stated.
“Broadly labelling communities as hot spots or zones is not merely imprecise. It misdirects resources. It inflates stigma. And it undermines the very strategies that research shows can actually reduce crime.”
