Assessing the impacts of various street-level characteristics on the burden of urban burglary in Kaduna, Nigeria

Abstract

Evidence suggests that crimes committed in urban environments are geographically concentrated across a range of scales, and that the variation in rates of crime within an urban space is significantly dependent on the physical environment as well as the situation in which the crime takes place. However, these assertions are typically drawn from environmental criminological studies that have focussed on Euro-American cities and western intellectual perspectives. We seek to move beyond these by focussing on a second-tier city in sub-Saharan Africa (Kaduna, Nigeria), a context for which very little literature exists. This paper therefore examines the association between a range of street characteristics and the risk of residential burglary in Kaduna for the first time. It describes a methodology for conducting a household crime victimisation survey in Nigeria, and then aggregating the information to a street-level to perform a population-based ecological study. It integrates street network analysis and statistical modelling techniques in order to provide novel estimates for factors that may increase the risk of burglary such as street accessibility metrics (e.g. connectivity, betweenness and closeness centrality), segment length, socioeconomic status and business activities. Finally, the article provides a discussion on the plausibility and implication of findings within the sub-Saharan African context.

Spatial Heterogeneity Modeling of the Neighbourhood Effects and Socio-economic Factors on Burglary Crimes in Nigeria

“…One type of crime that has significant ramifications is burglary, which involves unlawful entry into a building or structure with the intent to commit theft or another felony (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1995;Eck and Eck, 2003). Burglary is a major concern for individuals, researchers, law enforcement agencies, and policymakers, particularly in developing countries such as Nigeria, where it is a pervasive problem with high rates reported in urban and suburban areas (Musah et al, 2020;Iliyasu et al, 2022;Alabi and Abubakar, 2023).…”

Influence of Places of Resident Activities on Spatial Distribution of Drug-Related Crimes

“…In geographic criminology, it is increasingly recognized that the appropriate spatial unit of analysis needs to be considered explicitly and carefully chosen [15]. At different spatial scales, crime concentration (specifically, burglary and family theft) differs [16]. Researchers have found that crimes are more concentrated when smaller geographic units were used for analysis, and recent research has focused on addresses [17,18], street segments [19][20][21][22], and houses [23,24].…”