Offender Profiling Series
Profiling
Property Crimes
Edited by David Canter & Laurence Alison (2000)
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Property Crimes
Profiling Property Crimes
Mary Barker
The Criminal Range of Small-Town Burglars
An offender's patterns of travel around his home, and
his familiarity with the area may explain his choice of offence locations
(Brantingham and Brantingham, 1980). The hypothesis that offences will
tend to be distributed in a circle around the offender's home was tested
on 32 series of burglaries carried out in small towns in the south of
England. Home fell in the offence area in the majority of offence series
(29 out of 32, p < 0.005), and within the area described by the first
five offences in 22 of the 32 series (p < 0.05). The mean distance
travelled from home to offend in the whole series is 3.87 km and in the
first five offences is 3.67 km, suggesting that distances travelled in
committing the first five offences are indicative of the spread of the
whole series. This data demonstrates the validity of the circle hypothesis
in accounting for individual patterns of burglary.
Mary Barker has
a degree in psychology from the University of Southampton and an MSc in
Environmental Psychology from Surrey University. After leaving Surrey
in 1988, she went to work for the Home Office Research and Planning Unit
in central London, in their Crime Prevention Unit. There she investigated
ways of preventing vandalism and street robbery, and evaluated an initiative
to reduce crime on a run-down estate in Manchester. She went to the University
of Bristol in 1991 to work on a project assessing the value of sex offender
treatment programmes, and to evaluate a programme developed to divert
mentally disordered offenders from inappropriate imprisonment. She now
works for the Medical Research Council's Environmental Epidemiology Unit
in Southampton.
