Explaining crime 'hot spots': why a small number of places have a disproportionate amount of crime
In Ireland, the CSO reoffending statistics state 84% of young adults (under 21) re-offended within three years of being released from prison.
Research from around the world shows crime is spatially clustered in “hot spots”. This finding is so prevalent it is referred to as the “law of crime concentration”.
In addition, internationally, the distribution of crime is not random, a small proportion of targets and places experience a vastly disproportionate amount of crime — the same offenders and the same victims are involved in the most of the crime that occurs.
Repeat victimisation is crime against the same target: this can be the same person, household, business, vehicle, place, or other target. As a result of repeat victimisation, a significant proportion of all calls for policing support come from the same community or area.
Many studies have found about 2% of potential targets and locations suffer more than half of crime. Similarly, offending is perpetrated by a small group of repeat offenders — a study in the USA found 1% of the population was convicted for 63% of all violent crime.
Recidivism is the likelihood that an individual engages in repeat criminal behaviour and it is highly likely once an individual engages in criminal behaviour, they will do so again.
In Ireland, the CSO reoffending statistics state 84% of young adults (under 21) re-offended within three years of being released from prison.
Importantly, research on repeat victimisation and repeat offending has revealed a victim-offender overlap is consistently found, meaning offenders and victims share a number of qualities, linked to specific social conditions.
Perhaps one of the most impactful findings about the relationship between victims and offenders is that delinquent and criminal behaviour has one of the strongest effects on an individual's risk of violent victimisation.
In other words, individuals who engage in criminal activity, are highly likely to also be victims of criminal activity. While research points to the impact of the experience of victimisation on later offending, we do not definitively know which comes first, the victimisation or the offending. However, perhaps very telling, Danielle Sered, a professor of law, has been quoted as saying “no one enters violence for the first time by committing it”.
In the case of adolescent criminal activity, there is also a robust correlation between victimhood and offending. Of course, not all perpetrators are victims and not all victims are perpetrators, but US data suggests up to one third of youth are both offenders and victims.
In another study that looked at a youth population sample, again in the USA, researchers found physical victimisation by parents was strongly correlated with later violent offending by adolescent children, more so than other forms of physical victimisation.
Furthermore, property victimisation was associated with both violent and property adolescent offending; this was the case for males and females, but less is known about female victims and offenders.
What this means, in short, is that developmental trauma (trauma that occurs during childhood) due to victimisation, has an impact on the likelihood of later offending — this is the case for both direct experience of victimisation and secondary victimisation (witnessing someone else’s victimisation).
What is important here is that, except in specific narrow cases, the type of victimisation does not necessarily predict the type of offending — this means experiencing violence does not necessarily predict violent offending, but predicts offending more generally.
What this means, in a general way, and what partially explains the clustering of offending seen in the reporting data for Cork Garda stations, is that victimisation can lead to offending, and one of the greatest predictors of future offending behaviour is previous offending behaviour.
This is, of course, somewhat of a simplification, and offending behaviour is not pre-determined, but understanding the relationship between victimisation and perpetration is vital to understand how certain groups of individuals in society feature more prominently in crime figures than others, and how certain regions experience greater offending rates.
Understanding how and why repeat victimisation is such a feature of our society is also an important factor to consider.
Recognising the opportunities and barriers to committing crime in certain parts of a city or town, understanding the vulnerabilities of people who live, work and socialise in so-called crime "hot spots", and focusing on the impact of victimisation on the choice to engage in offending are all important parts of the story of crime clustering and concentration.
- Orla Lynch is professor of criminology at University College Cork
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