Linking Foraging Domestic Burglary: An Analysis of Crimes Committed Within Police-Identified Optimal Forager Patches

Abstract

Crime linkage is a systematic way of assessing behavioural or physical characteristics of crimes and considering the likelihood they are linked to the same offender. This study builds on research in this area by replicating existing studies with a new type of burglar known as optimal foragers, who are offenders whose target selection is conducted in a similar fashion to foraging animals. Using crimes identified by police analysts as being committed by foragers this study examines their crime scene behaviour to assess the level of predictive accuracy for linking crimes based on their offending characteristics. Results support previous studies on randomly selected burglary offence data by identifying inter-crime distance as the highest linking indicator, followed by target selection, entry behaviour, property stolen and offender crime scene behaviour. Results discuss distinctions between this study and previous research findings, outlining the potential that foraging domestic burglary offenders display distinct behaviours to other forms of offender (random/marauder/commuter).