What makes long crime trips worth undertaking? Balancing costs and benefits in burglars’ journey to crime

This study taps into rational choice theory and scrutinizes the assumption that profit maximization and effort minimization govern decisions related to burglary behaviour and the journey to crime. It treats distance as one of the major costs in the burglary target selection process and uses community characteristics to gain insight into how the anticipation of particular benefits favours the incremental costs of long crime trips. 2,387 burglary trips were extracted from police records and analysed using negative binomial regression analysis. The journey-to-crime distance was found to increase when burglaries were committed in communities containing motorways, dense road networks, and being ethnically heterogeneous. The journey-to-crime distance was found to decrease when densely populated areas and communities with high clearance rates are targeted.

Jaar van publicatie:2015

BOF-keylabel:ja

IOF-keylabel:ja

BOF-publication weight:2

CSS-citation score:3

Auteurs:National

Authors from:Higher Education

Toegankelijkheid:Open