Using epidemiological techniques for testing disease contagion, it has recently been found that in the wake of a residential burglary, the risk to nearby homes is temporarily elevated. This paper demonstrates the ubiquity of this phenomenon by analyzing spacetime patterns of burglary in 10 areas, located in five different countries. While the precise patterns vary, for all areas, houses within 200m of a burgled home were at an elevated risk of burglary for a period of at least two weeks. For three of the five countries, differences in these patterns may partly be explained by simple differences in target density. The findings inform theories of crime concentration and offender targeting strategies, and have implications for crime forecasting and crime reduction more generally.

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The "journey to crime," or the study of the distance between an offender's residence and offense site, has been a subject of study within criminology f o r many years. Implications arising from such research touches the majority of criminological theories. An overriding conclusion from this line of research is that most crimes occur in relatively close proximity to the home of the offender. Termed the distance-decay function, a plot of the number of crimes that an offender commits decreases with increasing distance from the offender's residence. In a recent paper, Van Koppen and D e Keijser raise the concern that inferring individual distance decay from aggregate-level data may be inap- propriate. They assert that previous research reporting aggregated distance-decay functions conceals individual variations in the ranges of operation, which leads them to conclude that the distance-decay function is an artifact. W e d o not question the claim that researchers should not make inferences about individual behavior with data collected at the aggregate level. However, Van Koppen and De Keijser's analysis raises four important issues concerning (1) the interpretation of the ecological fallacy, (2) the assumption of linearity in offender movements,(3) the interpretation of geographic work on profiling, and (4) the assumption of random target selection within a delimited range of operation. Using both simulated and nonsimulated data, we present evidence that reaches vastly different conclusions from those reached by Van Koppen and D e Keijser. The theoretical implications of our analyses and possibilities for future research are addressed.

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