Crime and Environment by R. N. Davidson

Author:R. N. Davidson [Davidson, R. N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9780429640148
Google: htmMDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-11T04:52:25+00:00

Source: Adapted from Dunn (1976b), Table 11.

(ii) Micro-environments of Property Victimisation. In Hindelang et al’s. (1978) survey of personal victimisation in the United States, 32 per cent of the respondents lost some property (theft was attempted in a further 11 per cent). In 57 per cent of the cases involving loss, the loss was less than $50. In Table 4.6 the incidence of loss is noted for various locations of the incident. Again we can observe that familiarity of the victim with the scene of the crime is important, but effect for likelihood of loss is the reverse of that for injury. Loss is more likely in less familiar surroundings. Again also offender/victim relations are implicated. Property loss resulted in 39 per cent of incidents involving strangers, but only 11 per cent of those involving non-strangers. These figures contrast with 23 per cent of stranger-victimisations resulting in injury compared to 35 per cent non-stranger. In other ways, too, loss and injury are inversely related – for example, use of menacing weapons is connected with greater loss but less injury.

Turning now to look at the particular case of burglary, Waller and Okihiro (1978) in a study of burglary victimisation in Toronto, found it useful to separate the analyses of houses and apartments. The independent effects of surveillability, income, social cohesion and nearness to public housing on victimisation were tested using multiple regression techniques. The hypotheses were generated basically from defensible space theory. For the houses, nearness to public housing was found to be the best predictor of victimisation and income and surveillability were also important. Social cohesion was found to have no independent effect, but the hours a property was left vacant did. So people with high risks of victimisation, for example in proximity to public housing, can diminish the chance of burglary by not leaving the house unoccupied for long and by allowing it to be overlooked. For apartments, affluence was again important, but carelessness in leaving doors insecure was more important than other locational variables (a connection with the proximity of industrial premises was rejected as spurious since almost all the apartments with doormen were thus situated and none of them were victimised). Waller and Okihiro are very cautious about the validity of defensible space theory.

My own survey of burglary (Davidson, 1980b) in Christchurch, New Zealand was based on reported incidents and therefore suffers from a lack of comparison with non-victimised households. Yet bearing in mind that burglary has a rather higher-than-average reporting rate, there are some patterns of relevance to the incidence of this particular crime. These revolve round the value of goods stolen. The variability of loss was so great among all types and situations of burglary that no rationale appears to exist in the selection of burglary victims at least as far as gain is concerned. Victims in the poorest parts of the city are likely to have as much stolen as those in the richer neighbourhoods – a pattern which contradicts Waller and Okihiro’s finding

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