“A Plague on both Your Houses?”: Risks, Repeats and Reconsiderations of Urban Residential Burglary

Abstract

Research has shown that mapping techniques are useful in forecasting future crime events. However, the majority of prospective mapping techniques has focused on the event-dependent influence of instigator incidents on subsequent incidents and does not explicitly incorporate the risk heterogeneity of the setting. The study here discussed is a modest attempt to address this issue by using a two-step process: first, using risk terrain modeling, we operationalized the "environmental backcloth," (the risk heterogeneity of an area) to forecast locations of residential burglaries in the urban city of Newark, New Jersey. Second, using the near repeat calculator, we assessed the variability of underlying risk between different types of residential burglaries. A discussion of the findings and the joint utility of these approaches is provided. Keywords environmental criminology; spatial risk analysis; risk terrain modeling; near repeat phenomenon; GIS With the exception of some studies (e.g.

Bus Stops and Violence, Are Risky Places Really Risky?

“…This highlights the importance of taking account both of the spatial micro-place influences and the surrounding environment to gain a good understanding of spatial risk for crime. RTM has also been analyzed in relation to near repeat patterns to establish where near repeats are more likely to occur (Moreto et al 2013;Kennedy et al 2016). Near repeat patterns are crimes that follow closely on an initial incident in both time and space, and which can be modeled similarly to how deceases spread.…”

“…The risk factors are often determined and/or weighted based on a regression or some other technique to ascertain how important they are for the crime outcome to be studied, and the resulting map of a city thus shows the relative risk for crime in each of the cells the city has been divided into. RTM has been tested on different crimes, including gun violence Kennedy et al 2011), gun crime , assault , burglary (Moreto et al 2013), violence against the police (Caplan et al 2014b), and motor vehicle theft .…”

Modeling Spatial Interactions between Areas to Assess the Burglary Risk

“…The third relates to the target environments that define activity spaces for burglars [19]. The proliferation of business establishments City and its nearby surroundings corresponds to increased burglary risk due to the crime generators and attractors, and the likelihood of quick disposal of stolen property [48,49,55].…”

“…(6) House prices (HSEPRICE) were obtained from the ONS at the geography of analysis areas; and (7) the presence of payday lending shops, mortgage brokers, and pawnbrokers (LENDERS) was determined using actual locations of these facilities. LENDERS quantifies the potential for criminogenesis because such facilities create adequate grounds for burglary [46][47][48]. The variable, LENDERS was constructed by searching the yellow pages and querying unique locations of operational facilities using the Google mapping application.…”

“…Finally, three variables signal opportunities for offender-target interaction [1,17,30,48,49]; (10) POPDENS is a variable measuring population density, i.e., the number of persons per 100 m 2 ; (11) DIST2CITY represents proximity to the City of London. It employs inverse distance weights using the shortest path from each area's centroid to the City.…”