Interrogating the “Murder Centre of South Africa”: The Spatial Distribution of Homicide Risk in Cape Town

For the study of spatially distributed phenomena, standardizing count data by underlying populations facilitates meaningful comparison across different times and places. However, significant barriers to such standardization are faced by researchers studying small geographic areas, where the capacity for collecting and reporting demographic information is limited. These challenges may include population data that are spatially or temporally misaligned with count data. Moreover, the quality of standardized data depends on the accuracy of both the count data and the population data used for standardization. This study argues that such challenges represent not just technical problems, but also social and ethical ones. Using the case of homicide rates for small geographic areas in Cape Town, South Africa, it provides a set of methods to address these challenges, and in so doing, demonstrates how such an approach can provide useful and more nuanced insight into the spatial distribution of phenomena of interest.