A paper I would like to hear, but sadly it's in Queensland Australia

Title: Determining how journeys-to-crime vary: Measuring inter- and intra-offender crime trip distributions



Abstract: Journey to crime studies have attempted to illuminate aspects of offender decision making that have implications for theory and practice. This article argues that our current understanding of journey to crime is incomplete as the aggregate distribution of crime trips (commonly known as the distance decay) does not take into account the considerable variation that exists between individual offenders’ crime trip distributions. Moreover, the common assumption of statistical independence between observations that make up a distribution is something that, until now, has yet to be tested for distributions of crime trips of multiple offenders. In order to explore these issues, three years of burglary data from a UK police force were linked to thirty-two prolific offenders to generate journey to crime distributions at the aggregate and offender levels. Using multi-level models it was demonstrated that the bulk (65%) of the variation of journeys to crime exists at the offender level, indicating that individual crime trips are not statistically independent. In addition the distance decay pattern found at the aggregate level was not, in the main, observed at the offender level – a result that runs counter to conventional wisdom. The implications of these findings are discussed.



Dr. Michael Townsley is a Lecturer in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University. He has previously held research positions at the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London and University of Liverpool. Michael's research interests include problem oriented policing, crime analysis and crime prevention. He completed his PhD in 2001 on spatial and temporal distributions of residential burglary.