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.

Cohen and Felson's (Cohen and Felson American Sociological Review 44 (4):588-608, 1979) routine activity theory posits that for a crime to occur three necessary elements must converge in time and space: motivated offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardianship. Capable guardians can serve as a key actor in the crime event model; one who can disrupt, either directly or indirectly, the interaction between a motivated offender and a suitable target. This article critically reviews the literature on guardianship for crime prevention. Our specific focus is two-fold: (1) to review the way guardianship has been operationalized and measured, and (2) to review experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations and field tests of guardianship. Research on routine activities has had an uneven focus resulting in the neglect of the guardianship component (Reynald Crime

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We explored the limitations of self-reports as substitutes for observation of deviant behavior. Results of a study conducted in The Netherlands indicated negligible correspondence between respondents' self-reports of tax evasion and officially documented behavior. Nonsignificant correlations were obtained despite the fact that all government claims against the respondents had been settled, unprotested, before this study began and despite the respondents' awareness that the accuracy of their selfreports could be checked against their tax records, [n addition, the results suggest that different explanatory variables may be correlated with each type of behavioral measure. In this instance, attitude toward the act i,\Kl) measures and subjective norm measures exhibited significant correlations with the self-report data but not with officially documented behavior, and measures of more broadly focused personal dispositions predicted actual behavior but not self-reports. Such outcomes suggest that the explanatory power of the theory of reasoned action may not extend to the domain of socially proscribed behaviors where self-presentation concerns are likely to prompt both misrepresentations of past behavior and reports of altitudes and perceived norms consistent with those misrepresentations.Verbal statements by individuals describing their past behavior are one of the most widely used sources of information about many domains of human activity. They are the basis of medical histories, court testimony, employment records, and tax returns, and have become a pervasive method for data collection within the social sciences. The popularity of self-reports, however, has not diminished the sense that they are often untrustworthy (e.g.,