Routine Activites Theory, Burglary Rates, and The Recession

I just posted a comment on a blog post on the Freakonomics website discussing a recent trend of declining burglary rates perhaps due to either: a) more people remaining home as a result of being unemployed, or b) less to steal due to increased foreclosures. The Freakonomics folks called for criminologists to weigh in. So here's what I had to say:

Here’s some insight from a criminologist. This observation (i.e., decreasing burglaries associated with increasing unemployment) is exactly what Routine Activities Theory hypothesizes. Routine Activities Theory is a criminological theory which posits that crime happens when: 1) a motivated offender, 2) a suitable target, and 3) a lack of a capable guardian converge in time and space. For example, according to Felson and Cohen’s (1979) first exposition of Routine Activities Theory, the increase of women in the workforce since the 1960s can explain a subsequent increase in burglary rates since more women in the workforce translates into more empty houses without a “guardian” at home to deter potential offenders. So it seems to me that these statistics are quite predictable based on Routine Activities theory.

As to the question of whether burglars turn to other kinds of crime when they can no longer burgle, this is a bit more tricky to examine. What we know from a longstanding body of research (see Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990 for a good summary) is that offenders are more generalists than they are specialists. Thus, it is entirely conceivable that there could be a whole shift in offending patterns when burglary becomes no longer feasible. More recently, however, some criminologists have found more specialization in offending than was previously believed to be. This research is ground-breaking; it will be interesting to track its development. Combine this with the conclusion coming from some research within the Rational Choice camp of criminology which finds evidence of certain types of offenders tending to specialize (e.g., older offenders, property offenders), and it could also be possible that a large fraction of burglars will simply “retire” when burglary becomes no longer feasible. This is a dissertation waiting to happen. If I were doing the dissertation, I would also draw upon the “hot spots policing” literature which has examined the extent to which crime just “moves around the corner” when targeted police enforcement strategies are used. The tentative conclusion so far from the “hot spots policing” literature is that crime does not move around the corner, but instead there is typically a diffusion of crime control benefits to neighboring places.