The Burglary as Clue to the Future

Abstract

Predicting when and where crimes are likely to occur is crucial for prioritizing police resources. Prior victimization is an excellent predictor of risk. Repeat victimization, when it occurs, tends to occur swiftly after an initial incident. The predictive power of prior victimization is greater than that of other analysed variables (see Budd 1999). Self-evidently, prior victimization yields no prediction about properties as yet unvictimized. This article, using data about the crime of domestic burglary, contends that research should seek to realize the predictive potential to be gained from both pre-and post-victimization factors. One of the advantages of crime reduction through the prevention of repeats is that it offers a constant (and, it is hoped, declining) rate of events that trigger preventive action, and hence a natural pace for preventive work. In that spirit, postvictimization prevention should, as well as targeting the victimized home, also protect other properties that are similar with respect to the dimensions used by burglars in target selection. The central purpose of the research here reported is to identify the ways in which it is prudent to allocate crime reduction resources in the wake of an offence and across time and location relative to the burgled home. We analysed police-recorded crime burglary data for the county of Merseyside. Using statistical techniques developed to study the transmission of disease, we first confirmed that burglaries do cluster in space and time. The operational payoff of this result is that a residential burglary flags the elevated risk of further residential burglaries in the near future (1-2 months) and in close proximity (up to 300-400 metres) to the victimized home. Put simply, the burglary event should trigger preventive action that is not restricted to the burgled home. The data enable prospective burglary hot-spotting.