Biting Once, Twice: The Influence of Past on Current Crime Location Choices

• In Event: Crime and Place: Offender Target Selection and Location Choice

Abstract

Two crimes committed in close spatial and temporal proximity often involve the same offender. This finding suggests that initial crime location choices promote repeats at or near the same crime location, possibly because the initial offense teaches the offender something that is useful in the follow-up. Nevertheless, offenders do not repeat themselves forever, but do change their crime locations. The current study investigates repeated crime location choices. We hypothesize that offenders are relatively more likely to commit crimes in areas where they have offended before. We further hypothesize that the effect depends on the proximity, the recency, the frequency, and the type of the previous crimes. The study uses police suspect data from 2003-2009 on all cleared crimes committed by 10,000 offenders in the greater The Hague area, Netherlands. The spatial unit of analysis is a postal code area, containing 18 residential properties and 40 residents on average. Discrete spatial choice models are used to test the hypotheses, as they enable us to control for other variables that might influence crime location choice, including the proximity of the offenders’ current and past homes, and postal codes area characteristics like residential mobility, affluence, accessibility and level of retail activities.

Authors

• Marre Lammers, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR)

• Barbara Menting, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR)

• Stijn Ruiter, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR)

• Wim Bernasco, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR)