IT’S ABOUT TIME: Spatio-temporal aspects of offender decision-making

Abstract

Why do offenders commit crime at certain times and places instead of others? Environmental criminologists have been studying these questions for decades. According to crime pattern theory (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981; 2008; Brantingham et al., 2017), offenders commit crime at those places where attractive crime opportunities overlap with their individual awareness spaces. These personal awareness spaces consist of offenders’ major routine activity nodes, such as home, school, work and recreational activities, and the travel paths that connect them. Previous research showed for example that offenders commit crimes near their current and former residential homes, as well as those of close family members. It is also found that offenders are more likely to return to specific target areas where they committed crime before.

However, both the theory and related empirical research in environmental criminology have to date remained rather a-temporal, as if the timing of offenders’ routine activities and their crimes plays no role. Previous studies have been mainly concerned with offenders’ choices of where to commit crime, but have barely addressed the timing of those spatial choices nor offenders’ choices of when to commit their crimes. But why would an offender have knowledge about whether a place is attractive for burglary at night, when he usually visits the area during the day? This dissertation improves the original crime pattern theory and proposes a time-specific extension: offenders’ spatial knowledge acquired during daily routine activities is not equally applicable to all times of day and week, which influences the locations where they subsequently choose to offend.

To test the novel idea of time-varying applicability of offenders’ awareness spaces, large-scale police data on repeat offenders of a variety of crime types and the specific days and times they committed these different types of offenses are analyzed. In addition, we combine this with the analysis of self-collected data on the spatio-temporal routine activity and crime patterns of a high-risk offender sample using the Time-specific Activity Space (TAS) survey that was specifically designed for this study. In this online survey, a sample of offenders reported extensively on the times of day and days of week they visited their most important routine activities over the past year, as well as where and when they had committed offenses.

Extending the existing body of research on offenders’ spatial decision-making, the results of the four empirical chapters of this dissertation show that studying the temporal criminal decision-making of individual offenders and its practical implications are also of importance. A first overall conclusion is that the original crime pattern theory needs a time-specific extension: offenders’ awareness spaces should no longer be conceptualized as time-invariant (Chapter 4 and 5). Second, offenders are quite consistent in their temporal criminal decision-making (Chapter 2, 4 and 5). A final conclusion of this dissertation is that offenders’ spatio-temporal patterns of criminal decision-making vary by type of crime and recency of the offenses (Chapter 2 and 4). In the end, knowing the right place and time for a crime might contribute to a safer future.