Calculate sum of points within buffer (ArcMap)

Question

I've created buffers around home origins and am looking to calculate the sum of shapefiles (in this case crime) within each buffer. How would I go about doing this? I want to know how many crimes are within each buffer.

• robin12345: Hello there! I've buffered around the home points and have tried spatially joining, which fails saying "out of memory" do you know of any work around? My laptop has plenty of memory on it so I'm not sure why this fails.
• Devdatta Tengshe: What is the spatial reference of your data? And what exactly are you trying to achieve? Maybe there is a better way of doing that
• robin12345: I'm using NAD_1983_CORS96_StatePlane_California_III_FIPS_0403_Ft_US because my area of focus is in California. I am trying to figure out how many crimes there are per buffer around multiple home locations. I buffered around the home locations and now need to find out the sum of crimes per individual buffer. Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

you should use the spatial join tool and select sum for statistics which are completely within source layer.

• robin12345: Thank you, that's what I thought, my version of ArcMap(10.1) doesn't have the sum/completely within option in the same window that I am aware of, I selected by location within the chosen buffer layer then tried spatially joining but ArcMap is telling me it's "out of memory" have you encountered this problem before?
• radouxju: you don't need to select first. You can do everything with the spatial join tool.
• Geoffrey West: it should, unless you are using the check box which indicates that you would like to spatially join target features to the nearest source feature so that it takes on the same attributes.

Answer 2

If the spatial join tool doesn't work, you could try with this equivalent method :

right click on your buffer polygon in the context menu, select "join" in the drop box, select "join based on location"

If you really have a very large number of points, the only workaround that I see is to loop on each polygon, select by location and count the number of features (using modelbuilder or, better, arcpy)

• robin12345: Great, I'll try it out now! Thank you for your help :)