Acquisitive Crime

Bayesian Structural Time Series and Geographically Weighted Logistic Regression Modelling Impacts of COVID-19 Lockdowns on the Spatiotemporal Patterns of London’s Crimes

“…In light of such, this study aimed to explore the pandemic-incurred impacts on London's crime patterns by categorising the main crime types into acquisitive crimes (ACs) and expressive crimes (ECs). Acquisitive crimes refer to the premeditated illegal acquisition of others' property, such as theft and robbery [9]; while expressive crimes represent those that generally lack a specific target and aim to vent personal negative emotions, including drug offences and violent crime [10]. Empirical studies had demonstrated significant variations in the impacts of COVID-19 restrictions on these two crime categories, and inspired the research hypotheses for this study to differentiate the impacts by their distinct motivations and natures.…”

“…Consequently, logistic regression is particularly handy for binary classification problems. The logistic regression equation is illustrated in Equation (9).…”

“…The GWLR model is an extended variant of the geographically weighted regression (GWR) by constructing local regression models for each geographical region based on the observations of the target region itself and its neighbours [39], where the so-called neighbours bear higher weights if they are closer to the target. The regression equation for each region is illustrated in Equation (9). ln(…”

“…Additionally, β i0 stands for the intercept of the region's regression equation, while ε i signifies the residual term [39]. Unlike the GWR model, GWLR deals with a binary response variable (categories 0 and 1), and thus the predicted outcome is the probability falling into named category 1, denoted by p i in Equation (9). Drawing inspiration from logistic regression principles, GWLR employs the sigmoid function to map the linear regression values onto the interval [0, 1] for predicting p i .…”

“…To mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the residents' health and well-being, the UK government implemented a series of restrictions and policies in 2020 and 2021 to prevent the spread of the pandemic but with significantly influences on people's behaviour patterns and psychological states [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Drawing upon criminological theories such as the routine activity approach and general strain theory, patterns of both acquisitive and expressive crimes may undergo noteworthy changes under such transitions, hence exhibiting varied patterns [9][10][11][12][13], attracting scholars to investigate the spatiotemporal changes in crime patterns between 2020 and 2021.…”