Burglary (publication)
Burglary is very common. Most people will be a victim at least once in their lifetime. What we know about burglary and about burglars has recently been summarized by Wim Bernasco in a chapter on the topic in the new Oxford Handbook of Crime and Public Policy, edited by Michael Tonry.
Full reference
Bernasco, Wim (2009). Burglary. In: Tonry, Michael (Ed.) Oxford Handbook on Crime and Public Policy (pp. 165-190). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Summary
- Burglary is the actual or attempted illegal entry into a dwelling with the intent to steal. Definitions vary between jurisdictions (and surveys) with respect to details, for example whether the actual entry requires force or destruction and what precisely constitutes a dwelling.
- Our knowledge about burglary is derived from victimization surveys, from the police and other criminal law organizations, and from offenders. Victimization surveys are preferred when the aim is to assess incidence and prevalence.
- Burglary is a common crime that occurs in industrialized countries with a decreasing annual rate of currently roughly 4 burglaries per 100 households. Burglary is most common in Anglo-Saxon countries. Victims report 40 percent of attempted burglaries and 80 percent of completed burglaries to the police, depending on the size of the loss involved.
- Burglars tend to burglarize in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods with poor social control. They prefer dwellings that are unoccupied and easily accessible and unobservable from the street, and they prefer items that are CRAVED (concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable, and disposable), the ideal being cash. Victimization risk is most strongly related to the amount of time a dwelling is left unoccupied. Victims quite often know the offenders.
- The majority of the people who commit burglaries are young males who burglarize to sustain an expensive lifestyle, often including drug use. Juvenile burglars are more likely to co-offend than adult burglars. Specialization in burglary is uncommon, as most burglars also commit other offenses, including violent ones.
- Burglaries are subject to time cycles that correspond to the times that dwellings are unoccupied. Although precisely for the reason of variation itself (absence of the occupants), the exact time of burglary is often unknown, and the daily time cycle shows most variation. Burglaries do not seem to vary a lot over the days of the week, but there is some seasonality in burglary data. In the United States most burglaries are committed during the summer, in Europe during the winter.
- Many burglaries are repeat burglaries of the same address. Often the second burglary involves the same offender as the first, and the second tends to take place within a few weeks or months after the first. The elevated victimization risk after burglary extends to dwellings in the immediate environment of the burglarized dwelling, which may indicate that a blocked repeat burglary elsewhere is displaced to nearby victims.
- Most conventional preventive measures against burglary are target-hardening devices that strengthen the physical barriers against unlawful entry to the property and measures that draw attention to illegal entries. There is some evidence that target-hardening devices are effective in reducing burglary. Preventing repeat victimization of recent burglary victims has been particularly successful.
- Large parts of an earlier essay on burglary (Shover, 1991) remain valid in 2008, in particular the characteristics of offenders, victims, and offending. Three notable changes are that burglary rates have dropped considerably worldwide, that more sources of information on burglary have become available worldwide, and that repeat burglary victimization has been introduced as a useful concept for prevention, especially in the United Kingdom. Future work could address the offender-victim nexus, as well as burglary detection by contemporary technologies such as CCTV and DNA. More ethnographic work along lines initiated by Wright and Decker (1994) would be welcomed.