Crimen en la Frontera: Exploring Texas-Mexico Border Crimes using a Geospatial Analysis.

Border crimes threaten public safety and security in the United States and the US-Mexico border region. Several evaluations support that data-driven, place-based crime prevention approaches can complement current public safety strategies and help reduce crime. Accordingly, place-based crime prevention may successfully prevent border crimes since these are inherently spatial. However, few studies have analyzed the geographies of Texas-Mexico border crimes, and assessments of data-driven, place-based crime prevention strategies of border crimes still lack a solid empirical foundation - especially in more rural border communities. To address this issue, this study builds police report data (Border Incident Assessment Report (BIAR)), used to record crime information related to cross-border criminal arrests and counter-criminal intelligence collection (2019-2022), for one rural county on the US-Mexico border. Results indicate high degrees of spatial concentrations of human smuggling and drug crimes. This study, moreover, explores how conventional theories of crimes and places (e.g., social disorganization) are able to explain border crimes. Findings indicate that while indicators work reasonably well to explain spatial patterns for drug crimes, more border crime specific indicators and models might have to be developed for human smuggling events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]