7.2 Environmental Criminology
Environmental criminology is interested in the interactions between people and what surrounds them (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1998). Crime is viewed as the product of potential offenders and their immediate and distal setting. “Environmental criminologists set out to use the geographic imagination in concert with the sociological imagination to describe, understand, and control criminal events” (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981c, p. 21). Their research is distinguished from the earlier ecological work of the Chicago School by this concern with the environment and by a change in focus from offender to criminal event. The field is multidisciplinary, its threads derived from human ecology, environmental psychology, behavioural geography, and the cognitive sciences.
Traditionally, the main interest of criminological positivism has been the offender, and much effort has gone into studying their backgrounds, peer influences, criminal careers, and the effects of deterrence. This focus has ignored the other components of crime — the victim, the criminal law, and the crime setting (Jeffery, 1977). Crime setting or place, the “where and when” of the criminal act, makes up what Brantingham and Brantingham call the fourth dimension of crime, the primary concern of environmental criminology.
Research in this area has taken a broad approach by including operational, perceptual, behavioural, social, psychological, legal, cultural, and geographic settings in its analyses. Micro, meso, and macrolevels have all been examined, and future research efforts will likely attempt a theoretical synthesis (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981c, 1984, 1998). One of environmental criminology’s major interests, the study of the dimensions of crime at the microspatial level, has led to useful findings in the area of crime prevention (see, for example, R. V. Clarke, 1992, 1997). Other projects include the analyses of crime trips (Rhodes & Conly, 1981), efforts to understand target and victim selections through opportunities for crime (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981c), crime prevention initiatives, notably crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) (Jeffery, 1977; Taylor, Gottfredson, & Brower, 1980; Wood, 1981), studies of shopping mall crime (Brantingham, Brantingham, & Wong, 1990), proposals for rapid transit security (Brantingham, Brantingham, & Wong, 1991; Buckley, 1996; Felson, 1989), and the analysis of patterns of fugitive migration (Rossmo, 1987; Rossmo & Routledge, 1990).
Various theoretical approaches have been identified within the environmental criminology field, including the consequence model, contextual theory, event mobility model, human ecology, pattern theory, rational choice theory, routine activity theory, and strategic analysis (Brantingham & Brant-
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ingham, 1998). Despite their differences, these approaches all share a common concern for context. Felson and Clarke (1998) suggest that individual behaviour is a product of a person’s interaction with their physical setting, and that setting provides varying levels of opportunity for crime. Routine activity, rational choice, and pattern theories have different emphases — society, local area, and the individual, respectively. But all three perspectives converge at the nexus of setting and opportunity. Crime opportunities depend on everyday movements and activities. Society and locality can change and structure crime opportunity, but it is the individual who chooses to offend.
Geographic profiling is based on the ideas and theoretical principles of environmental criminology. Pattern, routine activity, and rational choice theories all provide relevant perspectives, as does the geography of crime research within the event mobility model. 37Any research into the target patterns and hunting behaviour of criminal predators must be aware of the microlevel dimensions of offender, victim, crime, and environment.
7.2.1Routine Activity Theory
For a direct-contact predatory crime to occur, the paths of the offender and victim must intersect in time and space, within an environment appropriate for criminal activity. The routine activity perspective studies the processes and patterns associated with these requirements by examining how illegal acts depend upon regular legal activities. “Structural changes in routine activity patterns can influence crime rates by affecting the convergence in space and time of the three minimal elements of direct-contact predatory violation: 1) motivated offenders, 2) suitable targets, and 3) the absence of capable guardians against a violation” (Cohen & Felson, 1979, p. 589). The opportunity structure for crime can therefore be summarized as follows:
crime = (offender + target - guardian)(place + time).
The potential criminal must be motivated at the time of the encounter. The target needs to be seen as suitable or desirable from the perspective of the offender. Capable guardians include police, security, place managers, and ordinary citizens going about their daily activities. John Eck expanded routine activity theory by also considering the role of offender handlers (e.g., parents, work colleagues, etc.) who control the criminal, and place managers (e.g., shopkeepers, building superintendents, etc.) who supervise the environment, in addition to victim/target guardians.
37 The event mobility model, pioneered by James LeBeau and George Rengert, sees crime as a dynamic byproduct of spatial mobility influenced by nodes, paths, and movement.
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Felson (1998) suggests that to learn about a crime’s “chemistry,” one must first find who and what must be present, and who or what must be absent, for the crime to occur. Determine the setting (time and place) where these conditions are likely to happen, and then establish the access to and escape from this location. The acronym VIVA — the value or desirability of the target, the inertia of the target, the visibility of the target, and the access to and escape from the target — describes the salient risk factors associated with crime.
Rhythms are important for understanding the ebb and flow of people through an environment (Felson, 1998). A given location may range from crowded to deserted, depending upon the time, day of week, or month. There are rhythms associated with work, entertainment, shopping, bars, transit, traffic, parking, temperature, weather, lighting, police, victims, guardianship, and sleep. Rhythms make it difficult to think about geography independently of time. In order to understand the rational order of crime we need to consider, in Marcus Felson’s words, “map, clock, and calendar” (1986, p. 128).
Serial rape patterns are shaped by both offender activity space and victim routine activities and a useful investigative perspective may be gained by considering how the spatial and temporal patterns (time, weekday, season, weather, date, place) of each bring them into contact. Current and past routine daily activities of the rapist are important, as is the influence of prior crime “successes.” A sexual predator will “pass by the same bus stop every morning of his way to work for a month, seeing the same person or same type of person, nursing his fantasy, building up his confidence, until finally he assaults him or her” (Pearson, 1997, p. 160). Ouimet and Proulx (1994) found pedophiles had a higher chance of recidivism if their routine activities put them in contact with places frequented by children (e.g., schools, playgrounds, parks, daycare centres, etc.).
A framework for analyzing factors of importance in geographic profiling may be built from routine activity theory. A given crime can be dissected into components of offender, target, and environment. Productive lines of inquiry are then developed by considering the individual components and their respective overlaps. The Venn diagram in Figure 7.1 shows the interrelationship between different crime components.
This breakdown results in seven different areas for consideration. These areas, along with associated issues, are outlined as follows:
1.Offender — typology;
2.Victim — victimology;
3.Environment — neighbourhood, landscape, situation;
4.Offender/target — victim preference and specificity, hunting style;
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Figure 7.1 Offender/target/environment Venn diagram.
5.Offender/environment — transportation, offender’s mental map and activity space, hunting ground;
6.Target/environment — target backcloth, neighbourhood rhythms, encounter site; and
7.Offender/victim/environment — crime and crime scene.
This framework suggests other questions of interest to a geographic profile, some of which are presented in Chapter 10.
7.2.2Rational Choice Theory
The rational choice perspective takes a decision-making approach to explaining crime (Clarke & Felson, 1993b; Cornish & Clarke, 1986b). It is a “voluntaristic, utilitarian action theory in which crime and criminal behavior are viewed as the outcomes of choices. These, in turn, are influenced by a rational consideration of the efforts, rewards, and costs involved in alternative courses of action” (Cornish, 1993, p. 362).
[Rational choice theory assumes] that offenders seek to benefit themselves by their criminal behavior; that this involves the making of decisions and of choices, however rudimentary on occasion these processes might be; and that these processes exhibit a measure of rationality, albeit constrained by limits of time and ability and the availability of relevant information. (Cornish & Clarke, 1986a, p. 1)
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This theoretical perspective can trace its roots to the economic model of “rational man” and the classical school of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham (Jeffery & Zahm, 1993; see also Jacoby, 1979). The original psychological and economic models had a utilitarian philosophy that analyzed cost vs. expected utility, but their lack of concern with motive and preference limited their application to an understanding of criminal behaviour.
The rational choice perspective as presented by Cornish and Clarke (1986a) is based on three concepts: (1) criminal offenders are rational and make choices and decisions that benefit themselves; (2) a crime-specific focus is required; and (3) there is a distinction between choices related to criminal involvement and decisions related to criminal events. This framework results in a significant degree of importance being laid on situational variables such as scene and victim characteristics, and their choice-structuring properties. Offender perceptions are also meaningful for an understanding of the crimerelated calculus.
Experience changes an individual’s information processing, and a criminal may improve his or her decision making over time. Learning is an integral part of rational choice theory which sees behaviour as interactional and adaptive (Cornish, 1993), but rational does not equal intelligent or sophisticated. The cleverness of the average offenders is exaggerated in what Felson calls the “ingenuity fallacy.” Most crime is quick, easy, and unskilled. It is typically spontaneous or, at best, only casually planned; it is rarely well thought out. Many rapes, for example, occur by accident, the result of a burglar encountering a woman during a break in. The choices of offenders are often based on standing decisions that exhibit bounded rationality, limited by constraints of time, effort, and information. This is best understood through the concept of akratic behaviour, or temporal rationality, in which temptations override long-term decisions, especially if the former are visceral or emotional and the latter are rational (Trasler, 1993).
Pathological crimes involve non-pathological behaviour, and contrary to some beliefs, violent criminals including sex offenders exhibit a substantial degree of rationality (Miethe & McCorkle, 1998). Even psychotic individuals with unfathomable motives commit their crimes in manners that contain rational elements (Homant, forthcoming). “It may be that our reluctance to construe aggressive or violent behaviour as instrumental rather than expressive (or normal rather than pathological) sometimes has more to do with our own fears than with the facts of the matter” (Cornish & Clarke, 1986a, p. 14).
Former Florida deputy sheriff Gerard Schaefer, Jr., convicted in 1973 of two homicides and suspected of 11 others, wrote out the following murder plan, showing rationality in choice of crime location:
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