How Far to Travel? A Multilevel Analysis of the Residence-to-Crime Distance

Abstract

This study investigates whether individual-and area-level factors explain variation in the residence-to-crime distances (RC distance) for 10 offense types. Methods Five years of police data from Dallas, Texas, are analyzed using multilevel models (HLM/MLM). Results RC distances for Dallas offenders varied notably across offense types. Although several area characteristics such as residential instability and concentrated immigration were associated with the overall variance in RC distance, neither these nor the individual-level characteristics used in our models explained the offense-type variance in the RC distance. Conclusions Although individual-and neighborhood-level factors did not explain substantial variation in RC distance across the various offenses, neighborhood-level factors explained a significant portion of neighborhood-level variance. Other finding included a curvilinear effect of age on RC distance. The salience of these findings and their implications for future research and offender travel theory are discussed.

Journey-to-Crime Distances of Residential Burglars in China Disentangled: Origin and Destination Effects

“…When committing crimes, offenders would balance potential rewards, risks and efforts [4]. Longer crime trips could be compensated for by higher potential rewards and a lower risk [7,13,25]. Because people's decision-making criteria are hard to obtain [26], scholars commonly measure the three dimensions from an environmental perspective.…”

“…[18,28,29]. Residential burglars would travel long distances to commit a crime if the potential earning is sufficiently high [13].…”

“…Using a multilevel model, they showed how the variation in journey-to-crime distances could be decomposed into both inter-offender-level and intra-offender-level differences. Furthermore, many studies have shown that the individual-level differences cannot be ignored when analyzing journey-to-crime distances [7,[13][14][15][16][17].…”

“…Ackerman and Rossmo [13] used offender data from Dallas to investigate how residence-to-crime distances (RC distances) vary for 10 offense types. They found that 16% of the distance variance was contributed by target neighborhoods.…”

“…Neglecting any of the three aspects might lead to wrong conclusions regarding journey-to-crime distance patterns. Several studies have already focused on how journey-to-crime distances vary between offenders [14][15][16] and between target areas [7,13,15]. However, none of these accounted for origin effects.…”