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Journey-to-crime and offender’s geographic background: a comparison between migrant and native offenders in Beijing

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Abstract

Previous works on journey-to-crime research failed to examine the role of geographic background. This study investigates the journey-to-crime patterns of electric-bicycle thieves in Beijing. To examine the impact of geographic background on offenders’ travel behavior, the offenders are classified into native and migrant groups and their residing places into urban core and suburb areas. The native offenders who lived in urban core areas were found to make the shortest journey-to-crime trips; the offenders who lived in suburb areas, regardless of their migration status, traveled farther than their counterparts. Compared to the native offenders, the migrant offenders were more likely to make cross-boundary journey-to-crime trips, meaning that they make more trips from urban core areas to suburb or vice versa. Distance decay effect was revealed for all offender groups; but the effect is the strongest for the native offenders who lived in the urban core areas. In addition to the distribution of an offender’s activity anchor locations and the offense opportunities, we believe that an offender’s journey-to-crime trips are related to their spatial knowledge of the city. Our finding of the migrant offenders making longer journey-to-crime trips than their native offender counterparts may suggest that their trips are largely defined by their activity spaces and spatial awareness of the City when compared with the native offenders.

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Availability of data and material

The crime data used for this study cannot be shared due to privacy concern and per the data provider. The other data of Beijing are public data.

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Funding

The first author received grant support from Natural Science Foundation of Beijing municipality. Award Number: 9192022.

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Author notes

  1. Peng Chen and Yongmei Lu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Cyber Security, People’s Public Security University of China, Beijing, China

    Peng Chen

  2. Department of Geography, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

    Yongmei Lu

  3. Key Laboratory for Security and Risk Analysis, Ministry of Public Security, Beijing, China

    Peng Chen

Authors
  1. Peng Chen
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  2. Yongmei Lu
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Correspondence to Yongmei Lu.

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Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

Ethical approval

This study reports on the analyses of criminals’ journey-to-crime trips. The related data are secondary data. No identifiable information was accessed nor used by the researchers. Strict privacy protection and ethic procedures were followed with Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau (BMPSB) for the researchers to access the crime data.

Informed consent

No primary data were collected for this study. Informed consent concern does not apply.

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Chen, P., Lu, Y. Journey-to-crime and offender’s geographic background: a comparison between migrant and native offenders in Beijing. SN Soc Sci 1, 36 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-020-00038-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-020-00038-w

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