Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 48(1)

From the Editor: Special Issue on Crime and Place
Mike Maxfield, George Rengert, Elizabeth Groff, and John Eck

The Relevance of Micro Places to Citywide Robbery Trends: A Longitudinal Analysis of Robbery Incidents at Street Corners and Block Faces in Boston
Anthony A. Braga, David M. Hureau, and Andrew V. Papachristos

Robbery, and the fear it inspires, has a profound effect on the quality of life in certain urban neighborhoods. Recent advances in criminological research suggest that there is significant clustering of crime in micro places, or ‘‘hot spots,’’ that generate a disproportionate amount of criminal events in a city. In this article, the authors use growth curve regression models to uncover distinctive developmental trends in robbery incidents at street segments and intersections in Boston over a 29-year period. The authors find that robberies are highly concentrated at a small number of street segments and intersections rather than spread evenly across the urban landscape over the study time period. Roughly 1 percent and 8 percent of street segments and intersections in Boston are responsible for nearly 50 percent of all commercial robberies and 66 percent of all street robberies, respectively, between 1980 and 2008. Our findings suggest that citywide robbery trends may be best understood by examining micro-level trends at a relatively small number of places in urban environments.

Robberies in Chicago: A Block-Level Analysis of the Influence of Crime Generators, Crime Attractors, and Offender Anchor Points
Wim Bernasco and Richard Block

The effects of crime generators, crime attractors, and offender anchor points on the distribution of street robberies across the nearly 25,000 census blocks of Chicago are examined. The analysis includes a wide array of activities and facilities that are expected to attract criminals and generate crime. These include a variety of legal and illegal businesses and infrastructural accessibility facilitators. In addition to these crime attractors and generators, the role of the presence of motivated offenders’ anchor points, as measured by offenders’ residence and gang activity, is assessed. The analysis also includes crime attractors, crime generators, and offender anchor points in adjacent census blocks. The findings demonstrate the strength of the effects of crime generators and attractors and offender anchor points on the frequency of street robbery at the census block level.

Testing the Stability of Crime Patterns: Implications for Theory and Policy
Martin A. Andresen and Nicolas Malleson

Recent research in the ‘‘crime at places’’ literature is concerned with smaller units of analysis than conventional spatial criminology. An important issue is whether the spatial patterns observed in conventional spatial criminology focused on neighborhoods remain when the analysis shifts to street segments. In this article, the authors use a new spatial point pattern test that identifies the similarity in spatial point patterns. This test is local in nature such that the output can be mapped showing where differences are present. Using this test, the authors investigate the stability of crime patterns moving from census tracts to dissemination areas to street segments. The authors find that general crime patterns are somewhat similar at all spatial scales, but finer scales of analysis reveal significant variations within larger units. This result demonstrates the importance of analyzing crime patterns at small scales and has important implications for further theoretical development and policy implementation.

Exploring Theories of Victimization Using a Mathematical Model of Burglary
Ashley B. Pitcher and Shane D. Johnson

Research concerned with burglary indicates that it is clustered not only at places but also in time. Some homes are victimized repeatedly, and the risk to neighbors of victimized homes is temporarily elevated. The latter type of burglary is referred to as a near repeat. Two theories have been proposed to explain observed patterns. The boost hypothesis states that risk is elevated following an event reflecting offender foraging activity. The flag hypothesis, on the other hand, suggests that time-stable variation in risk provides an explanation where data for populations with different risks are analyzed in the aggregate. To examine this, the authors specify a series of discrete mathematical models of urban residential burglary and examine their outcomes using stochastic agent-based simulations. Results suggest that variation in risk alone cannot explain patterns of exact and near repeats, but that models which also include a boost component show good qualitative agreement with published findings.

Factors Associated with the Guardianship of Places: Assessing the Relative Importance of the Spatio-Physical and Sociodemographic Contexts in Generating Opportunities for Capable Guardianship
Danielle M. Reynald

Routine activity theory can be applied to places in which a motivated offender encounters a suitable target that is not effectively guarded. The focus of this article was on the third aspect of this theory as the explanatory power of guardianship was examined and compared to other related contextual factors in explaining criminal victimization at micro-places. This empirical study used an observational measure of guardianship in action in residential places by observing household occupancy, monitoring by residents, and direct intervention during the daytime and nighttime. The results demonstrated the significant role of active guardianship compared to other spatio-physical and sociodemographic factors in explaining the amount of property crime recorded at the street segment level. This article is concluded by highlighting the ways in which these contextual factors help generate opportunities for capable guardianship, while simultaneously blocking opportunities for property crime.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, February 2011: Volume 48, Issue 1