Abstract
Explaining why crime is spatially concentrated has been a central theme of much criminological research. Although various theories focus on neighborhood social processes, environmental criminology asserts that the physical environment plays a central role by shaping people's activity patterns and the opportunities for crime. Here, we test theoretical expectations regarding the role of the road network in shaping the spatial distribution of crime and, in contrast to prior research, disentangle how it might influence offender awareness of criminal opportunities and the supply of ambient guardianship. With a mixed logit (discrete choice) model, we use data regarding (N = 459) residential burglaries (for the first time) to model offender spatial decision‐making at the street segment level. Novel graph theory metrics are developed to estimate offender awareness of street segments and to estimate levels of ambient guardianship, distinguishing between local and nonlocal guardianship. As predicted by crime pattern theory, novel metrics concerning offender familiarity and effort were significant predictors of residential burglary location choices. And, in line with Newman's (1972) concept of defensible space, nonlocal (local) pedestrian traffic was found to be associated with an increase (decrease) in burglary risk. Our findings also demonstrate that “taste” preferences vary across offenders, which presents a challenge for future research to explain.
Highlights
OFFENDERS AND THE ROAD NETWORKThe rational choice perspective (Cornish and Clarke, 1986) describes offenders, such as burglars, as nonarbitrary decision-makers who consider the costs and benefits of action alternatives, including the decision of where to offend (Clarke and Felson, 1993)
Table 3 shows the results for the key variables of interest, along with the model fits from the mixed logit (ML) models
The top panel of table 3 shows the point estimates for the mean multiplicative odds ratio (OR) of a target street segment being selected after a one-unit increase in the relevant independent variable
Summary
The rational choice perspective (Cornish and Clarke, 1986) describes offenders, such as burglars, as nonarbitrary decision-makers who consider ( briefly) the costs and benefits of action alternatives, including the decision of where to offend (Clarke and Felson, 1993). As used by researchers in previous studies (e.g., Davies and Johnson, 2015), trips can be restricted so that only destinations within a specified range (di j ≤ r ) are considered likely destinations: Wre σi j (e) wi w j i, j∈V,di j ≤ r σi j k wk (3) In what follows, it is this measure (equation (3)) of overall betweenness that we used to estimate movement potential for pedestrians (to test hypothesis 3) and vehicles (to test hypothesis 6). To allow us to differentiate between offender awareness (potential) and the effort (time) required to travel to a particular location, in addition to computing idiosyncratic betweenness values for each offender, we estimate the effort required to reach locations in the network (to test hypothesis 1) This is derived from the graph theory metric “closeness centrality” (Freeman, 1977): Ce =. For all analyses, the unit of analysis is the street segment
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