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Offender as Forager? A Direct Test of the Boost Account of Victimization

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Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that burglary clusters in space and time, resulting in temporal changes in crime hotspot patterns. Offender foraging behavior would yield the observed pattern. The offender as forager hypothesis is tested by analyzing patterns in two types of acquisitive crime, burglary and theft from motor vehicle (TFMV). Using a technique developed to detect disease contagion confirms that both crime types cluster in space and time as predicted, but that the space–time clustering of burglary is generally independent of that for TFMV. Police detections indicate that crimes of the same type occurring closest to each other in space and time are those most likely to be cleared to the same offender(s), as predicted. The implications of the findings for crime forecasting and crime linkage are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The inclusion of these events generated the same pattern of results as reported below.

  2. For the spatial dimension, bandwidths of 50, 100 and 200 m were used. For the temporal parameter, bandwidths of 7 days, 14 and 28 days were used. All analyses not shown are available upon request.

  3. As the location of events is preserved, risk heterogeneity is accounted for in the analysis.

  4. Some TFMV events (N = 155) took place in car parks. A further analysis confirmed that the exclusion of these events did not affect the results observed.

  5. The same patterns of results were observed for analyses for which the data for only one file was shuffled. This was the case irrespective of which dataset was shuffled.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by British Academy research grant LRG 45507. The authors would like to thank Dorset police for providing the data analyzed, and in particular Derek Johnson. The authors would also like to thank (in order of geographic proximity) Kate Bowers, Wim Bernasco, Henk Elffers, George Rengert, Jerry Ratcliffe, and Mike Townsley for discussions on the topic of near repeats.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London, Second Floor, Brook House, 2–16 Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7HN, UK

    Shane D. Johnson, Lucia Summers & Ken Pease

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  1. Shane D. Johnson
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  2. Lucia Summers
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  3. Ken Pease
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Correspondence to Shane D. Johnson.

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Johnson, S.D., Summers, L. & Pease, K. Offender as Forager? A Direct Test of the Boost Account of Victimization. J Quant Criminol 25, 181–200 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-008-9060-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-008-9060-8

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