Understanding variation in distance to crime from within the rational choice perspective

Ondertitel:Variatie in de afstand van criminele verplaatsingen begrepen vanuit het rationele-keuze-perspectief

Korte inhoud:Previous journey-to-crime research has resulted in a number of recurrent findings: offenders typically travel only short distances to commit their offences and the likelihood of a location being selected as a crime site decreases with the distance from the offenders’ home areas. These recurrent findings are understood from within the rational choice perspective. This perspective propagates the view that offenders balance the costs and benefits of their decisions against each other. Offending behavior and offenders’ decision-making are governed by profit maximization and effort minimization. The short journey-to-crime distances that are typically observed illustrate offenders’ inclination to minimize efforts as much as possible. However, earlier journey-to-crime studies may have been biased towards finding short journey-to-crime distances because they typically focused on a limited geographic range to study offender mobility and ignored non-local offending patterns. Furthermore, recent studies into offender mobility increasingly suggest that not all offenders may be inclined to minimize their efforts and travel short distances to offend. Some offenders select targets much further away from home. Consequently, their crime trips are much longer. These observations raise a number of questions with regard to the journey to crime and with regard to the occurrence of longer crime trips in relation to the rational choice perspective: which distances do offenders typically travel to offend? How can variation in distance to crime be explained? Does the outcome of offenders’ target selection process, in particular in the case of remote target selection, suggests that offenders may balance the costs and benefits of their target decisions? This dissertation addresses these questions and attempts to understand why some journeys to crime are longer than others. It builds upon the rational choice perspective to reframe the occurrence of long crime trips as purposeful behavior that is the outcome of a process in which costs and benefits are balanced. It studies offender mobility and the journey to crime within multiple large geographic areas. First, an analysis of five-year (2006-2010) public prosecutor data on property offences (N = 10,478) in the greater Ghent area, Belgium allows to confirm the existing knowledge with regard to journey-to-crime research and underlines that the occurrence of long crime trips is less exceptional than previously believed. Crime trips are typically short but one in three crime trips are longer than 10 km. Second, a negative binomial regression analysis of six-year (2006-2011) local police recorded crime data (N = 2,387) on residential burglaries committed in East and West Flanders, Belgium demonstrates that environmental attributes at the municipality level help to explain variation in distance to crime, corroborating one of the central tenets of the rational choice framework. Finally, a discrete spatial choice analysis of seven-year (2006-2012) Federal Police recorded crime data (N = 650) on residential burglaries in East Flanders, Belgium with the residence as the spatial unit of analysis highlights that a reduction in risk exposure may help offenders to compensate for increased travel costs. Although confirmation is found for some of the central arguments contained within the rational choice perspective, the combined results stress that some of these arguments need reconsideration. In particular, the hypothesized importance of reward-related information could not be established and risk-related information is of major importance for understanding increases in crime trip length. The difficult relationship between the rational choice perspective and empirical research is discussed.

Jaar van publicatie:2015

Toegankelijkheid:Open