How Do Residential Burglars Select Target Areas? A New Approach to the Analysis of Criminal Location Choice

TLDR: In this paper, the authors introduced the discrete spatial choice approach to the study of criminal target choice, which is used to assess whether residential burglars are attracted to target areas that are affluent, accessible, and poorly guarded.

Abstract: This paper introduces the discrete spatial choice approach to the study of criminal target choice. The approach is used to assess whether residential burglars are attracted to target areas that are affluent, accessible, and poorly guarded. In addition, the importance of these criteria is postulated to vary across burglars. The theory is tested using data on 548 residential burglaries, committed by 290 burglars from the city of The Hague, the Netherlands. The likelihood of a neighbourhood’s being selected for burglary is heightened by its ethnic heterogeneity, its percentage of single-family dwellings, and its proximity to where the offender lives. The results and prospects of the discrete spatial choice approach for spatial target selection research are discussed. The problem of criminal location choice is a classical one in criminology. It pertains to the descriptive question of where offenders commit their offences, and to the explanatory question of why they commit them there, rather than somewhere else. In the literature, answers to the latter question have involved two general notions that have usually been dealt with separately. The first is the notion that for a crime to occur, a motivated offender must find a suitable target, in the absence of a capable guardian (Cohen and Felson 1979). The second is the notion that crimes tend to occur close to where the offender lives (Baldwin and Bottoms 1976: 78–98; Wiles and Costello 2000; Ratcliffe 2003). This paper combines these two notions, in an attempt to answer the question of how residential burglars select their target areas. For that purpose, we introduce the discrete spatial choice approach. This approach analyses target selection as being influenced by target characteristics and by offender characteristics, simultaneously. We argue that the discrete spatial choice approach is able to integrate previous findings in this field of inquiry, and is a useful theoretical and methodological tool for research in criminal target choice. In the next section, we present a review of the literature on target selection by burglars. Subsequently, we give an overview of earlier methods in the study of criminal location choice, and introduce the discrete spatial choice approach and the closely related conditional logit model. The approach is then applied to residential burglary in the city of The Hague, the Netherlands, using data from police records. The paper concludes with a summary of the main results, and a discussion of the potential and the pitfalls of the discrete spatial choice approach for studying criminal location choice. * Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), PO Box 792, NL-2300 AT Leiden, The Netherlands, email: bernasco@nscr.nl or nieuwbeerta@nscr.nl, telephone: +31 71 5278527. The Haaglanden Police Force provided the crime data used in this study. We acknowledge the contributions of Rieny Albers, Hanneke van Essen, Floor Luykx (NSCR), Astrid Patty and Peter Versteegh (Haaglanden Police Force) to the collection and processing of data. We thank Richard Block, Henk Elffers, Jan de Keijser, Jasper van der Kemp and Peter van Koppen and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on a previous version.