NCJ Number
227829
Journal
Journal of Quantitative Criminology Volume: 25 Issue: 2 Dated: June 2009 Pages: 181-200
Date Published
June 2009
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This study investigated whether spatial and temporal patterns of acquisitive crime were consistent with the idea that offenders engage in foraging activity.
Abstract
Results provide support for theories of offender foraging. The patterns which mark out foraging activity are the temporal variation in crime locales, and the attribution of such variation to patterns in the behavior of particular offenders. Rather than crime consistently being more likely to occur in some places (hotspots) than others, there is dependency in the data such that a crime is more likely to occur at a particular location if another took place recently and nearby. The offender as forager was 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 offenders as predicted. The implications of the findings for crime forecasting and crime linkage are discussed. Data were collected from recorded crime data for residential burglary and TFMV for the Bournemouth police basic command unit (United Kingdom). Tables and references