Burglars blocked by barriers? The impact of physical and social barriers on residential burglars' target location choices in China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2020.101582Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This study aims to understand how barriers affect why residential burglars commit their crimes at particular locations in a major Chinese city.

  • All burglars are less likely to target areas separated by rivers and major roads.

  • Local burglars are more likely to target communities with a majority of local residents than the other ones.

  • Such social barrier effect is less pronounced for nonlocal burglars.

Abstract

Based on an offender spatial decision-making perspective, this burglary target location choice study aims to understand how physical and social barriers affect why residential burglars commit their crimes at particular locations in a major Chinese city. Using data on 3860 residential burglaries committed by 3772 burglars between January 2012 and June 2016 in ZG city, China, conditional logit (discrete choice) models were estimated to assess residential burglars' target location choice preferences. Three types of physical barriers were distinguished: major roads with access control, major roads without access control, and major rivers. Social barriers were constructed based on the Hukou system to reflect how local and nonlocal residents live segregated lives. Results show that residential burglars are less likely to target areas for which they have to cross a physical barrier and even less likely to do so if they have to cross multiple rivers. Local burglars are more likely to target communities with a majority of local residents than communities with a majority nonlocal population or a mixed community. Such a social barrier was less pronounced for nonlocal burglars. These findings add new insight that physical and social barriers affect, to various degrees, where residential burglars in China commit their crimes.

Introduction

Residential burglary is one of the most common property crimes in China and the risk of burglary victimization varies considerably between areas, just as it does in Western societies (Liu & Li, 2017; Ye, Xu, Lee, Zhu, & Ling, 2015). All previous Chinese studies have explained these burglary patterns by looking at differences between areas. They found that areas with lower levels of guardianship (Jiang, Lambert, & Wang, 2007), higher turnover (Lo & Jiang, 2006) and predominantly low-rise buildings (Gu, Zhou, & Yan, 2016) have more burglaries. Although these studies provide insights into where burglaries are more likely to happen in China, most of them implicitly assume that areas with specific environmental characteristics determine where burglaries are committed. However, areas do not decide on being targeted, but burglars decide on where they commit their crimes. In their residential burglary study for the city of The Hague, the Netherlands, Bernasco and Nieuwbeerta (2005) introduced the crime location choice approach, which starts from an offender decision-making perspective. The discrete spatial choice model they used allows for the inclusion of both area-level and offender-level characteristics in order to understand why offenders target particular areas. Ruiter (2017) identified 17 journal articles that used the crime location choice approach to model offender spatial decision-making in the Netherlands, USA, UK, Belgium, and Australia. Only recently was the approach first used to study street robbery (Long, Lin, Feng, Zhou, & Jing, 2018) and theft from the person (Song et al., 2019) in China.

All crime location choice studies so far have shown that offenders are more likely to commit crimes in areas that are closer to their homes than in areas further away (Ruiter, 2017). However, those studies that only included distance from home as a measure for how offenders are related to potential target areas implicitly assumed that all areas at the same distance are equally likely targeted. This assumption clearly oversimplifies how people can actually use urban space. In a recent study of Frith, Johnson, and Fry (2017), they used time distance by considering the configuration and properties of the road networks to better measure the cost of travel. Travel is often easier in some directions than in others as it might be obstructed by physical barriers like major roads and rivers. Several crime location choice studies indeed found that offenders are less likely to target areas on the other side of such physical barriers (Baudains, Braithwaite, & Johnson, 2013; Clare, Fernandez, & Morgan, 2009; Summers, 2012). Next to these physical barriers, offenders' target location choices were also found to be affected by social barriers, which are related to how people live segregated lives. Offenders of a specific racial/ethnic background were less likely to target areas with a majority population of a different racial/ethnic group (Bernasco & Block, 2009; Bernasco, Block, & Ruiter, 2013; Bernasco, Ruiter, & Block, 2017; Chamberlain & Boggess, 2016). However, these studies rarely tested the effects of physical and social barriers simultaneously.

Several scholars have examined the possible relationship between physical and social barriers, albeit in a non-crime related context. Noonan (2005) showed for the city of Chicago that physical and social barriers often coincide, as people who live on different sides of a physical barrier often belong to different racial/ethnic groups. Roberto and Hwang (2016) showed that the link between physical and social barriers is not limited to the highly-segregated city of Chicago, but actually quite common across large US cities. The coexistence of the physical barriers and social barriers underscores the need of simultaneous treatment of both types of barriers.

The same should hold for Chinese cities, as the rapid urbanization has led to the construction of many highways and urban expressways, which cut across cities and divide them into distinct functional regions (Yuan, Yu, & Xie, 2012). At the same time, Chinese cities have increasingly become socially segregated since the 1980s (Lin & Gaubatz, 2017), with many migrants from the rural areas moving into the cities to earn a living. These domestic migrants often live segregated from the local residents (Lin & Gaubatz, 2017; Zhu, 2015), they are generally poorer and less educated and they also have distinct lifestyles and activity spaces (Liu, Huang, & Zhang, 2017; Zhou, Deng, Kwan, & Yan, 2015).

This study conceptualizes social barriers for the Chinese context, without a link to racial/ethnic differences, but specific to how local residents and domestic migrants from other parts of China live segregated lives. It improves upon previous research by testing the impact of such social barriers on burglars' crime location choices while simultaneously accounting for the effects of physical barriers. Furthermore, previous studies on physical barriers only tested whether offenders are less likely to target areas on the other side of one physical barrier (Baudains et al., 2013; Clare et al., 2009; Summers, 2012), whereas the study area used here allows for testing whether offenders are even less likely to target areas for which they have to cross multiple physical barriers. This study combines both physical and social barriers in a single model and test their effects on burglary location choices simultaneously.

Section snippets

Theory and hypotheses

Crime pattern theory provides a framework for understanding why target choices of residential burglars would be affected by physical and social barriers. According to its geometry of crime, offenders commit crimes in areas where their awareness space overlaps with the spatial distribution of attractive targets (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1993; Brantingham & Brantingham, 2008). People's awareness spaces get shaped during their routine activities, as these make them spend most of their time in

Study area and spatial units of analysis

In order to test the hypotheses, this study analyzed residential burglary data obtained from the Municipal Public Security Bureau of ZG city,1 a large city located in the southern part of China. Since the reform and opening up of China in the 1980s, ZG city has developed rapidly, attracting a large number of domestic migrant workers. In 2015, it had a total population

Bivariate relationships

Based on the first two columns of Table 2, most burglaries were committed without crossing a river (78.83%) or a major road with access control (64.92%), and many burglaries (39.15%) without crossing a major road without access control. These bivariate statistics underscore the validity of the physical barrier hypotheses. For social barriers, it can be seen that local burglars committed 355 burglaries (62.28%) in communities with a majority of local residents, followed by 193 (33.86%) in mixed

Discussion and conclusions

This burglary location choice study from China tested how physical and social barriers affect which areas are targeted by residential burglars. This is the first attempt in simultaneous assessment of the impact physical and social barriers on target selection.

Physical barriers obstruct travel and people therefore have limited knowledge about areas on the other side of such barriers, thus reducing the likelihood a burglar would target those areas because offenders are assumed to commit crimes

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Research Team Program of Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (No. 2014A030312010), National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2018YFB0505500, 2018YFB0505503), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41531178, 42001171, 41901177), and Key Project of Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou City, China (No. 201804020016).

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