Social Network Analysis of Police Incident Data for Population Health

Abstract

This paper introduces social network analysis as a tool for modelling and analysing large-scale patterns of interpersonal interaction documented in Australian police incident datasets. Australian police forces use anonymised but unique record identifiers to document victims and offenders involved in offence-related incidents. These unique record identifiers allow researchers to visually model incident data as social networks where each justice involved person is represented by a node and each interaction between two people is represented by a tie between nodes. Any given person may be documented as either or both a victim and/or an offender across multiple successive incidents recorded over ..