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Space–Time Patterns of Risk: A Cross National Assessment of Residential Burglary Victimization

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Abstract

Using epidemiological techniques for testing disease contagion, it has recently been found that in the wake of a residential burglary, the risk to nearby homes is temporarily elevated. This paper demonstrates the ubiquity of this phenomenon by analyzing space–time patterns of burglary in 10 areas, located in five different countries. While the precise patterns vary, for all areas, houses within 200 m of a burgled home were at an elevated risk of burglary for a period of at least two weeks. For three of the five countries, differences in these patterns may partly be explained by simple differences in target density. The findings inform theories of crime concentration and offender targeting strategies, and have implications for crime forecasting and crime reduction more generally.

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Notes

  1. Earlier work concerned with diffusion processes which used a different methodology is acknowledged (e.g. Morrill 1965).

  2. Given the number of cells considered in each table and the number of areas for which the analysis was considered, it was clearly beyond the scope of the research to check the distributions for every cell.

  3. The results of this approach are available from the authors upon request.

  4. Recall that the use of the term ‘communication’ is used to describe emergent patterns in the data, but is not intended to suggest that the same mechanisms operate in the transmission of a disease and crime risk. For example, disease pathogens infect new hosts following direct contact and the communication of the disease is made possible through microbe replication. In the case of burglary, the thesis is that the same burglar swiftly victimizes a series of nearby homes. Thus, different causal mechanisms are believed to be involved but the outputs of these, measured in space and time, may have similar signatures.

  5. If the aim is to control for variations in target density, an alternative test is the k-nearest neighbor test (Jacquez 1996). This uses the (asymmetric) nearest-neighbor relations as distance measures between all events, and thus assumes that physical spatial distance is irrelevant to the contagion process. Our aim was not to control for target density, but to study its relation to space–time clustering.

  6. This task was completed by identifying the largest cluster of contiguous cells in the bottom left of each grid with the criterion that 95% of the cells in the cluster should be significant at the 5% level or less.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a British Academy International Collaborative Network grant, and additional funding from UCL Futures, NSCR and the Research Incentive Fund at Temple University. Thanks go to the following police forces for providing the data here analyzed: Australian Federal Police (ACT policing), Beenleigh police division (Australia), Dorset police force (UK), Florida police department (USA), Haaglanden police force (Netherlands), New Zealand police force, Merseyside police (UK), and Philadelphia police department (USA). We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this paper.

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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, Kate J. Bowers & Michael Townsley

  2. Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Leiden, The Netherlands

    Wim Bernasco & Henk Elffers

  3. Temple University, Philadelphia, USA

    Jerry Ratcliffe & George Rengert

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  1. Shane D. Johnson
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Correspondence to Shane D. Johnson.

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Johnson, S.D., Bernasco, W., Bowers, K.J. et al. Space–Time Patterns of Risk: A Cross National Assessment of Residential Burglary Victimization. J Quant Criminol 23, 201–219 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-007-9025-3

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