Predicting where burglaries are most likely to take place is harder than you might think, even for police officers. This lecture looks at how work at the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science has shown that crime tends to follow the same patterns in time and space as communicable diseases, and can be studied in the same way. A crime mapping system developed at the institute enables police officers to more accurately predict when and where crime will most likely occur.Lecture given on 14 November 2006.