Putting process into routine activity theory: Variations in the control of crime opportunities

Abstract

This article extends the basic tenets of routine activity theory by explicating three unique mechanisms that influence crime prevention actions: relationality, relativity and responsibility. We assess how macro variations in crime opportunities influence the social processes associated with readiness for three crime control actions: offender handling, target guarding and place managing. We explore the utility of these theoretical advancements using multilevel survey data from the Australian Community Capacity Study that includes 4390 residents across 148 suburbs in the Greater City of Brisbane. Incorporating individual measures of perceptions of routine activity dynamics and community-level measures of social structure, we use multilevel mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression to explain variations in the three different crime control actions. We find moderate support that some social processes are more strongly paired with some types of crime control actions than others: relationality most strongly predicts offender handling, relativity is most significantly associated with target guarding, and responsibility is most influential for place managing. We argue that the routine activities of crime can be better understood by delineating the social processes of crime prevention, and that these should be modeled on a continuum and considered in context of community variations in social structures.