Familiar Locations and Similar Activities: Examining the Contributions of Reliable and Relevant Knowledge in Offenders’ Crime Location Choices

• Published date: 01 March 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677241244464
• Author: Sophie Curtis-Ham,Wim Bernasco,Oleg N. Medvedev,Devon L. L. Polaschek
• Date: 01 March 2025
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Familiar Locations and Similar

Activities: Examining the

Contributions of Reliable and

Relevant Knowledge in

Offenders’Crime Location

Choices

Sophie Curtis-Ham

1

, Wim Bernasco

2,3

,

Oleg N. Medvedev

1

, and Devon L. L. Polaschek

1

Abstract

This paper examines the recently theorized roles of the reliability and relevance of offenders’

knowledge of locations in their crime location choices. Using discrete choice models, we analyzed

offenders’pre-offense activity locations from police data (home addresses, family members’home

addresses, work, school, prior offenses, victimizations, non-crime incidents, and other police con-

tacts) and 17,054 residential burglaries, 10,353 non-residential burglaries, 1,977 commercial robber-

ies, 4,315 personal robberies, and 4,421 extra-familial sex offenses, in New Zealand. Offenders

were most likely to offend where their prior activity locations indicated they had highly reliable

and highly relevant knowledge—where they were both highly familiar with the area and had con-

ducted similar activities—and less likely where offenders had less familiarity or less similar activities.

The results support a recent extension of crime pattern theory and highlight the importance of

including both reliability and relevance factors when modeling or predicting offenders’crime loca-

tion choices.

Keywords

crime location choice, crime pattern theory, discrete spatial choice, police data, routine activity

locations

1

TePuna Haumaru NZ Institute of Security and Crime Science & Te KuraWhatu Oho Mauri School of Psychology, Te Whare

Wa

̄nanga o Waikato University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

2

Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam, the Netherlands

3

School of Business and Economics, Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the

Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Sophie Curtis-Ham, University of Waikato, Evidence Based Policing Centre, Level 11 160 Lambton Quay, Wellington 6011,

New Zealand.

Email: sophiec@waikato.ac.nz

Original Article

International Criminal Justice Review

2025, Vol. 35(1) 9-28

© 2024 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10575677241244464

journals.sagepub.com/home/icj

Introduction

Understanding why people commit crime where they do has important implications for policing

and criminal justice. Predicting where an individual will offend can help criminal justice agencies to

manage offenders’risk of re-offending by identifying their high-risk locations. It can also help police

to prioritize suspects in crime investigations by identifying suspects most likely to have committed

the crime given its location (Curtis-Ham et al., 2020).

According to crime pattern theory, people commit crime where their awareness space—the areas

they know around activity locations where they live, work, and socialize—overlaps with crime

opportunities (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1991, 1993a, 1993b). Much research has investigated

the kinds of places where these overlaps occur on aggregate (see e.g., Bruinsma & Johnson,

2018; Weisburd et al., 2016). Decades of research also conf‌irm that individual offenders tend to

choose targets near their activity locations (Bernasco, 2019; Costanzo et al., 1986; Menting et al.,

2020; Rengert & Wasilchick, 1985). However, individualized explanations and predictions would

require understanding into how people’sdifferent activity locations inf‌luence their crime locations:

where in relation to these locations are they most likely to identify and exploit crime opportunities?

To address this question, Curtis-Ham et al. (2020) recently proposed a theoretical model whereby

attributes of individuals’activity locations inf‌luence crime location choice via two psychological

mechanisms ref‌lecting how their activities generate knowledge of crime opportunities. In the

model, offending is more likely where, and when, offenders have reliable knowledge (affected by

the frequency, recency, and duration of their past activities there) that is relevant to the future

crime (affected by the similarity of those past activities to the future crime). Essentially, the more

familiar the location is to the offender and the more similar the offender’s prior activities in the loca-

tion are to the crime at hand, the more likely is the offender to choose the location for committing the

crime.

However, because prior research has focused on specif‌ic attributes of activity locations in isolation

(as elaborated below), this theory has not been empirically validated. To enhance the empirical

support for this theory and improve our ability to explain and predict crime locations, we explored

the roles of reliability and relevance using data on burglary, robbery, and extra-familial sex offenses

in New Zealand. To do so, we used discrete spatial choice modeling with a large dataset of police-

recorded crimes and activity locations. The study illustrates both the opportunities and challenges

involved in employing this methodological paradigm with police administrative data. We f‌irst

describe the existing literature considering relationships between individuals’prior activity locations

and their crime location choices.

Prior Activities and Crime Location Choice

A range of studies demonstrate links between individual prior activity factors and crime location

choice. For example, the odds of an offender committing crime are higher in proximity to any place

they have visited more frequently (Bernasco, 2019; Menting et al., 2020). Each of the reliability

(familiarity) factors—frequency, recency, and duration—have also been evidenced for specif‌ic

types of activity node. People are more likely to commit crime near: locations of frequent prior

crimes than of a few or no prior crimes (Lammers et al., 2015); more recent home and family

home addresses (Bernasco, 2010a; Bernasco & Kooistra, 2010; Lammers et al., 2015; Menting

et al., 2016); and locations of more recent prior crimes (Bernasco et al., 2015; Lammers et al.,

2015; Long et al., 2018). Regarding duration, the longer an offender has resided somewhere, the

higher the odds of committing crime nearby (Bernasco & Kooistra, 2010; Lammers et al., 2015).

With the relevance mechanism, the more similar the prior activities are to a future offense, the

more likely they are to generate relevant knowledge of the location’s potential for such offending

10 International Criminal Justice Review 35(1)