Crime Pattern Theory Research Articles

A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY TO CRIME: EFFECTS OF RESIDENTIAL HISTORY ON CRIME LOCATION CHOICE*

Many offenses take place close to where the offender lives. Anecdotal evidence suggests that offenders also might commit crimes near their former homes. Building on crime pattern theory and combining information from police records and other sources, this study confirms that offenders who commit robberies, residential burglaries, thefts from vehicles, and assaults are more likely to target their current and former residential areas than similar areas they never lived in. In support of the argument that spatial awareness mediates the effects of past and current residence, it also is shown that areas of past and present residence are more likely to be targeted if the offender lived in the area for a long time instead of briefly and if the offender has moved away from the area only recently rather than a long time ago. The theoretical implications of these findings and their use for investigative purposes are discussed, and suggestions for future inquiry are made.

White-collar crime: an opportunity perspective

It is no longer necessary to argue for the importance of white-collar crime. Its devastating financial and physical effects are obvious. The task now is to develop better ways to control and prevent white-collar crimes. In this paper, we argue that in order to reduce white-collar crime we must first identify the specific opportunity structures associated with the offenses we wish to prevent. That is, we must identify the features of the settings that allow the crime to occur. Three major theories are reviewed here that can help in this task: routine activity theory, crime pattern theory, and situational crime prevention theory. These theories address how crime opportunities are formed by immediate environments and then discovered and evaluated by potential offenders. We demonstrate that they can also be used to uncover how specific forms of white-collar crimes are committed and help structure analyses of the underlying opportunity structures associated with these offenses.

Acknowledging the Influence of Geographic Outliers: An Analytical Caution in Examining Chronic Repeat Victimization

Evidence suggests that repeat victimization at specific addresses is higher in areas identified by computer algorithms as being ‘hot spots’. Recently developed explanations for the existence of repeat victimization2 within high-crime areas extend the tenets of crime pattern and routine activities theories. The emerging hypotheses account for the apparent overlap by suggesting that offenders in the area are more prolific (returning to known or ‘quickly replenishing’ opportunity more frequently) or that there is a concentration of nearby offenders whose routine activities expose them to the same victims.3 The current demonstration presents a methodological caution to those engaged in this stream of research. Some of the apparent overlap between chronic repeat victimization at precise addresses and hot spots can be attributed to analytic factors associated with the mapping software used to identify geographic concentrations of crime. This implies the need for careful consideration of the appropriateness of analytic strategies that are significantly influenced by the presence of extreme values or spatial outliers.