Offender as Forager? A Direct Test of the Boost Account of Victimization

Recent research has demonstrated that burglary clusters in space and time, resulting in temporal changes in crime hotspot patterns. Offender foraging behavior would yield the observed pattern. The offender as forager hypothesis is tested by analyzing patterns in two types of acquisitive crime, burgl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of quantitative criminology 2009-06, Vol.25 (2), p.181-200
Main Authors: Johnson, Shane D., Summers, Lucia, Pease, Ken
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Burglary
Cluster analysis
Contagion
Crime patterns
Crime victims
Criminal justice
Criminal offenses
Criminals
Criminology
Criminology and Criminal Justice
Drug related crimes
Foraging
Forecasting
Forecasts
Hypotheses
Investigations
Law and Criminology
Methodology of the Social Sciences
Offenders
Original Paper
Police
Property crimes
Sociology
Spacetime
Statistics
Theft
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Summary:Recent research has demonstrated that burglary clusters in space and time, resulting in temporal changes in crime hotspot patterns. Offender foraging behavior would yield the observed pattern. The offender as forager hypothesis is tested by analyzing patterns in two types of acquisitive crime, burglary and theft from motor vehicle (TFMV). Using a technique developed to detect disease contagion confirms that both crime types cluster in space and time as predicted, but that the space—time clustering of burglary is generally independent of that for TFMV. Police detections indicate that crimes of the same type occurring closest to each other in space and time are those most likely to be cleared to the same offender(s), as predicted. The implications of the findings for crime forecasting and crime linkage are discussed.
ISSN:0748-4518
1573-7799
DOI:10.1007/s10940-008-9060-8