The influence of awareness space on crime location choice

Why do crimes occur where they do? According to Brantingham and Brantingham’s crime occurs at locations where attractive opportunities overlap with awareness spaces of individuals motivated to commit crime. A person’s awareness space consists of locations where time is spend during daily routines, for example home, school, work, leisure locations or home locations of friends and family. Someone’s awareness space grows and shrinks depending on the frequency, duration and timing of exposure to such places. For example, when a person moves house, his or her awareness space changes considerably.
This research project adds to the existing literature on by not only studying where people live or have lived, but also other locations where people spend their time, and the relationship between those locations and crime locations. Not only registered data are used for this study. Interviews will be conducted with young people, in which detailed information on their awareness spaces will be obtained, as well as information on places where these youngster came into contact with unsafe situations and illegal behavior. We study the influence of awareness space on crime location choice using discrete spatial choice models.
This research is funded by a VIDI grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
 

 
 
Project members: Wim Bernasco, Marre Lammers, Barbara Menting, Stijn Ruiter