Crime in Context: Utilizing Risk Terrain Modeling and Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations to Explore the Dynamics of Criminogenic Behavior Settings

Abstract

Risk terrain modeling (RTM) is a geospatial crime analysis tool designed to diagnose environmental risk factors for crime and identify the places where their spatial influence is collocated to produce vulnerability for illegal behavior. However, the collocation of certain risk factors' spatial influences may result in more crimes than the collocation of a different set of risk factors' spatial influences. Absent from existing RTM outputs and methods is a straightforward method to compare these relative interactions and their effects on crime. However, as a multivariate method for the analysis of discrete categorical data, conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC) can enable exploration of the interrelationships between risk factors' spatial influences and their varying effects on crime occurrence. In this study, we incorporate RTM outputs into a CACC to explore the dynamics among certain risk factors' spatial influences and how they create unique environmental contexts, or behavior settings, for crime at microlevel places. We find that most crime takes place within a few unique behavior settings that cover a small geographic area and, further, that some behavior settings were more influential on crime than others. Moreover, we identified particular environmental risk factors that aggravate the influence of other risk factors. We suggest that by focusing on these microlevel environmental crime contexts, police can more efficiently target their resources and further enhance

Homicide Investigations in Context: Exploring Explanations for the Divergent Impacts of Victim Race, Gender, Elderly Victims, and Firearms on Homicide Clearances

“…CACC has been used increasingly in the criminological literature to examine contextual variability in a wide range of outcomes including reporting crimes to police (Rennison, Dragiewicz, & DeKeseredy, 2013), sentencing (Hart, Miethe, & Regoeczi, 2014; Lockwood, Hart, & Stewart, 2015), bystander intervention in violent victimizations (Hart & Miethe, 2008), sex offender community notification decisions (Koetzle Shaffer & Miethe, 2011), weapon choice in sexual homicides (Heng Choon & Beauregard, 2016), and lethal outcomes in sexual assaults (Mieczkowski & Beauregard, 2010). In fact, a recent special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice was devoted solely to studies that use CACC in criminal justice research (Caplan, Kennedy, Barnum, & Piza, 2017; Drawve, Thomas, & Hart, 2017; Hart, Rennison, & Miethe, 2017; Miethe, Troshynski, & Hart, 2017; Rennison & DeKeseredy, 2017; Venger, 2017).…”

Identifying Situational Clustering and Quantifying Its Magnitude in Dominant Case Configurations: New Methods for Conjunctive Analysis

“…Finally, some scholars have used CACC as part of a broader, multifaceted data analytic strategy (e.g., Caplan, Kennedy, Barnum, & Piza, 2017; Chan & Beauregard, 2016). For example, Summers and Caballero (2017) introduced “spatial conjunctive analysis” to determine whether certain configurations of facilities believed to be associated with street robberies had a statistically significant influence on the risk of victimization, using a Monte Carlo spatial pattern test (Besag & Diggle, 1977).…”

The Situated Contexts of American Terrorism: A Conjunctive Analysis of Case Configurations

“…Recognizing that there may be numerous causes to the same outcome (Hart & Miethe, 2009), conjunctive analysis is an analytical technique for identifying whether certain variables are causally related to an outcome while simultaneously accounting for other measures of interest. CACC has recently grown in use by researchers for various criminological outcomes (e.g., Caplan, Kennedy, Barnum, & Piza, 2017; Rennison & DeKeseredy, 2017). Below, we provide a brief overview of the approach.…”