Role of the Street Network in Burglars' Spatial Decision‐making*

Abstract

That crime is spatially concentrated now seems incontestable (e.g., Eck and Weisburd, 1995). Explaining why this is so, however, is still a central theme of criminological research and a matter of some debate. Several prevailing theories assert that the environment plays a central role in shaping the distribution of crime by facilitating the convergence in space and time of offenders and suitable targets, in the absence of capable guardians (Cohen and Felson, 1979). One fundamental determinant of this is the road network because it defines how people move through the urban environment. In so doing, it serves a "dual function," determining the opportunities for crime offenders encounter and become aware of (e.g., Beavon, Brantingham, and Brantingham, 1994), and influencing the locations through which ordinary citizens move and provide ambient guardianship. The aim of prior research has been to examine the role of the road network on crime, but it has failed to isolate the influence of these two mechanisms. This is largely because analyses have been conducted to examine only the location of crime events, without reference to the offenders involved. In addition, most researchers have tended to employ crude metrics to describe the network, and their findings have often lacked statistical rigor.To address these shortcomings, in this article, we make several novel contributions. We use a discrete choice approach (McFadden, 1974), or more accurately an offense location choice approach (Bernasco and Nieuwbeerta, 2005), to estimate empirically how the opportunities that are targeted by burglars differ from those that are not. Our research differs from previous studies of offender spatial decision-making in two important ways. First, in most previous studies, scholars have examined offender location choice at the area level (for the exceptions, see Bernasco, 2010b, andVandeviver et al., 2015). Here, consistent with contemporary theory (Weisburd, Groff, and Yang, 2012) and the research questions at hand, we do so at the street segment level. Second, we build on previous work (Davies and Johnson, 2015) and introduce to the discrete choice literature a methodological approach that aims to estimate independently how the road network influences offender awareness of crime opportunities, on the one hand, and guardian potential at particular locations, on the other. By following Townsley, , we also recognize that offenders may vary in the extent to which their spatial decision-making is affected by different factors, and so we employ mixed logit statistical models to estimate parameters and how they vary across offenders. In combination, our approach allows us to examine the dual role that the road network might play in shaping burglar spatial decision-making and the extent to which this varies across offenders.The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In the next section, theoretical perspectives and research are reviewed to introduce the theoretical model. The second and third sections describe the data and analyt...

Crime Feeds on Legal Activities: Daily Mobility Flows Help to Explain Thieves’ Target Location Choices

“…Establishing a reduced burglary risk in properties along cul-de-sacs, Johnson and Bowers (2010) suggested that their reduced permeability might make cul-the-sacs unfamiliar places for non-residents, including most potential motivated offenders. Frith et al (2017) use the physical layout of the street network to generate alternative measures of offender spatial awareness, finding the reduced accessibility in the street network reduces the likelihood of street segments being targeted.…”

The Foraging Perspective in Criminology: A Review of Research Literature

“…Finally, recent extensions of OFT might prove to be valuable in the development of criminological theory, with some contemporary issues showing great similarity to issues in criminology. Criminological research into offender decision-making increasingly tries to account for between-offender differences, for example in the study of variation in journeys to crime (Townsley and Sidebottom, 2010;Van Daele, 2010) or in burglary location choice (Townsley et al, 2016;Frith et al, 2017). Similarly, studies in animal ecology are increasingly attentive to diet variation among members of the same species (e.g., Tinker et al, 2012;Bolnick et al, 2003;Cantor et al, 2013).…”

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

“…It could be that an increase in road network density is related to more ambient population, which would increase the risk of detection. Frith, Johnson [39] also argue that street networks are related to both levels of guardianship and accessibility and opportunities. In this research, it seems that road network density in residential burglars' home areas is more related to opportunities, whereas in target areas it seems more related to levels of guardianship.…”

“…The costs of travel are however not directly related to travel distance, because some places are better accessible than others, for example because they are better connected to the transportation system [37]. Several studies suggest that burglars would use the transportation system to travel over longer distances [38,39]. Vandeviver, Van Daele [7] used the rational choice perspective to understand why some offenders travel over long distances.…”