Consistency and specificity in burglars who commit prolific residential burglary: Testing the core assumptions underpinning behavioural crime linkage

Abstract

Purpose. Behavioural crime linkage is underpinned by two assumptions: (a) that offenders exhibit some degree of consistency in the way they commit offences (their modus operandi [MO]); and, (b) that offenders can be differentiated on the basis of their offence behaviour. The majority of existing studies sample at most three crimes from an offender's series of detected crimes and do not examine whether patterns differ across offenders. Here, we examine patterns observed across the entire detected series of each sampled offender, and assess how homogeneous patterns are across offenders.Methods. Using a non-parametric resampling approach, we analyse the entire crime series of 153 prolific burglars to determine if they exhibit consistency and specificity in the way they commit offences.Results. Findings suggest that offenders exhibit consistency in the way they commit offences. With respect to specificity, our results suggest that patterns are not homogeneous across offenders or the type of MO considered -some offenders exhibit more specificity than do others, and offenders are more distinctive for some aspects of their MO (particularly spatial choices) than they are for others.Conclusions. The findings provide support for the underlying principles of crime linkage, but suggest that some aspects of an offender's MO either conform to a common preference, or are perhaps more influenced by situational factors than stable scripted preferences. That some offenders fail to demonstrate sufficient specificity for accurate linkage suggests that identifying which crimes are likely to be the work of offenders who display more specificity a priori constitutes one challenge for future research of this kind.

Role of the Street Network in Burglars' Spatial Decision‐making*

“…A final point that emerges from the results published in the qualitative literature (e.g., Bennett and Wright, ; Cromwell, Olson, and Avary, ; Nee and Meenaghan, ; Rengert and Wasilchick, ; Wright and Decker, ) and in recent quantitative studies (Bouhana, Johnson, and Porter, ; Townsley and Sidebottom, ) is that although certain features often seem to influence offender decision‐making, there is also clear variation across offenders in those factors. For example, in their interviews with burglars, Bennett and Wright () found that the presence of passers‐by deterred approximately one half of their sample either unconditionally or under some conditions, whereas the remaining half reported being undeterred by the presence of others.…”

An Epidemiological Study of Burglary Offenders: Trends and Predictors of Self-Reported Arrests for Burglary in the United States, 2002-2013

“…Burglary is associated with a range of negative consequences for burglary victims including loss of property and damage to one's home, emotional trauma, stressful hypervigiliance due to the violation of privacy, increased anxiety, depression, and fear of crime, and others. 1 Like all criminal offenses, there is substantial heterogeneity among burglary offenders in terms of their broader criminal career (Bouhana, Johnson, & Porter, 2014;Hargreaves & Francis, 2014;Shover, 1996), motivation for perpetrating burglary (Maguire, 1988;Wright, Logie, & Decker, 1995), geographic and temporal issues relating to burglary (Johnson, 2008;Johnson & Bowers, 2004;Kocsis & Irwin, 1998), and the association of burglary to other forms of crime (Fox & Farrington, 2012;Shover, 1996;Steffensmeier, Harris, & Painter-Davis, 2015). Thus, burglary can denote a one-off adolescent prank by a juvenile offender, an opportunistic offense by an offender enmeshed in an antisocial lifestyle, or a carefully planned instrumental crime 3 (Shover, 1973).…”

The feasibility of using crime scene behaviour to detect versatile serial offenders: An empirical test of behavioural consistency, distinctiveness, and discrimination accuracy

“…In terms of the former, offender geographical and temporal behaviour (the ICD and TP, respectively) demonstrated greater consistency, distinctiveness, and discrimination accuracy than MO behaviours. These findings are consistent with previous research on commercial burglary, residential burglary, and auto theft (e.g., Bennell & Jones, ; Bouhana et al ., ; Goodwill & Alison, ; Tonkin et al ., ). A variety of explanations have been proposed for this superior performance (see Bennell & Jones, ), including that an offender can exert greater control over decisions about where and when to commit a crime than she or he can over decisions about what to steal, whether violence is used, etc., which depend to some extent on situational characteristics at the crime scene.…”

“…Approximately 30 empirical studies have been published in the last 15–20 years that seek to test whether sufficient offender behavioural consistency and distinctiveness exist to allow linked crimes to be distinguished from unlinked crimes (referred to as discrimination accuracy hereafter). These studies support the existence of offender behavioural consistency and distinctiveness for some offenders, some of the time, in a range of person‐ and property‐oriented crimes, including commercial and residential burglary (e.g., Bennell & Jones, ; Bouhana et al ., ), commercial and personal robbery (Burrell, Bull, & Bond, ; Woodhams & Toye, ), arson (e.g., Santtila, Fritzon, & Tamelander, ), rape/sexual assault (e.g., Yokota, Fujita, Watanabe, Yoshimoto, & Wachi, ), homicide (e.g., Melnyk, Bennell, Gauthier, & Gauthier, ), and auto theft (e.g., Tonkin, Grant, & Bond, ).…”