Revictimization: Reducing the Heat on Hot Victims  .
Series: NIJ Research in Action
Published: November 1996
14 pages
23,166 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Research in Action
Jeremy Travis, Director
November 1996

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Highlights

Highly prized is the truly productive crime
prevention strategy, one that lightens the load on
an overworked criminal justice system and, more
importantly, reduces the number of victims. But to
prevent crimes -- especially in hot spots
(high-crime areas) -- police must determine where
and when crimes are likely to occur. Drawing
primarily on data collected in the United Kingdom,
this Research in Action underscores why a focal
point for effective crime prevention is the hot
dot, the victim who repeatedly suffers crime.

Illustrative of hot dots, two studies indicated
that about 4 percent of surveyed victims suffered
approximately 44 percent of the offenses. In one
locality, other research found that 43 percent of
domestic violence incidents occurring over a
25-month period involved only about 7 percent of
1,450 households.

Among the characteristics of repeat victimization:

o An individual's past crime victimization is a
good predictor of his or her subsequent
victimization, often inflicted by the same
offender.

o The greater the number of prior victimizations,
the higher the likelihood the victim will endure
future crime.

o If revictimization occurs, it tends to do so
soon after the previous victimization.

o Repeat victimization is highest in areas of
highest crime.

Those characteristics of the revictimization
phenomenon provide a reliable early warning of
where and when crime may strike next. Armed with
that knowledge, police can maximize the potential
of crime prevention. When focused on the recently
victimized, crime prevention is seen to be
integral with victim support. A police officer's
visit to a crime victim is directed at preventing
the next possible incident as well as addressing
the current one.

Concentration on preventing revictimization by
targeting efforts to and around repeat victims
emphasizes the importance of detecting offenders
and makes detection an important component of
prevention. For example, a 24-percent reduction in
domestic burglaries over 9 months in a
municipality was attributed, in large part, to
fewer domestic burglary revictimizations as the
result of victim-focused crime prevention efforts.

Although one should not make the mistake of
overemphasizing the role of revictimization in
preventing crime, an equally serious error is
failure to explore the repeat-victimization
approach as a valuable component of crime
prevention strategy.

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Revictimization: Reducing the Heat on Hot Victims

by Ken Pease and Gloria Laycock

Apprehending criminals, prosecuting them
successfully, and sentencing the guilty fairly and 
efficiently are, of course, critical goals of any
criminal justice system. But the real prize in
crime strategy must be effective crime prevention.
Preventing crime means fewer criminals for the
overworked criminal justice system and, more
importantly, fewer victims.

Why not more prevention?

So, in the United States and United Kingdom, why
do we not have clear crime prevention strategies
at the national or even lower governmental levels?
The reasons are many.

First, neither police departments nor other agencies 
can prevent crime by working alone. They require 
partnerships, but effective crime prevention 
partnerships are not easily established.

Second, crime prevention success is notoriously
difficult to identify. Crime rates rise and fall,
and the more locally based the monitoring the more
unpredictable the changes. Counting something that
did not happen -- a prevented crime -- is guesswork, 
aided by general statistics.

Third, in the United States and United Kingdom,
policing has been driven by high call-for-service
volume, which fuels a reactive, incident-based,
fast-response mode of law enforcement. In that
context, one does not become a police chief by
being a crime prevention expert.

Perhaps the biggest problem confronting prevention
is that to thwart crimes, police must anticipate
the place and time of occurrence -- especially for
the hot spots, the high-crime areas. At first,
that may appear impossible, but "sting" operations
work because the place and time of a crime is
known precisely -- they have been chosen by the
police. Fortunately, less dramatic approaches can
shorten the odds of being in the right place at
the right time to deflect or detect crime.

Hot spots and hot dots

The hot spot is usually a hot smudge, with crimes
occurring within a block or two of each other. The
ultimate hot spot, the hot dot, is the victim who
repeatedly suffers crime. Such victims receive too
little attention. That is evident in the United
States and United Kingdom, where official
statistics provide disembodied crime counts and
enumerate offenders at different stages of
processing. We fail to find counts of victims in
such statistics.

Even victimization surveys, until very recently,
provided little indication of how victimizations
were distributed across victims. In 1976, the late
Richard Sparks was the first person to highlight
this issue for victim surveys.[1] Despite his
prescience, national victimization surveys on both
sides of the Atlantic continued to neglect those
who experience repeat crimes.

Methods that help police focus efforts on where
and when crime is likely to occur may be based on
knowledge of offender, place, or victim. For
example, crime pattern analysis is used to
pinpoint hot spots. Concentrating on recent
victims of crime can help to identify crime-prone
people and places and thus lead to more efficient
deployment of police resources. As for repeat
victimization, the following assertions can be
made with reasonable confidence:[2]

o An individual's past crime victimization is a
good predictor of his or her subsequent
victimization.

o The greater the number of prior victimizations,
the higher the likelihood the victim will
experience future crime.

o Especially within the most crime-prone areas, a
substantial percentage of victimizations consists
of repeat victims. In large measure, areas differ
in crime rate by virtue of rates of repeat
victimization within them.

o If victimization recurs, it tends to do so soon
after the prior occurrence.

o The same perpetrators seem to be responsible for
the bulk of repeated offenses against a victim.

o Many factors, from police shift patterns to
computer systems, conspire to mask the true
contribution of repeat victimization to the
general crime problem.

A look at victimization data

The authors' awareness of the significance of
repeat victimization for the deployment of crime
control efforts came after examining the data
generated by the 1986 Kirkholt burglary prevention
project in England.[3] Because too little money
was available to protect all the homes at risk,
police had to identify those most at risk. What
quickly became evident was that the best predictor
of a future burglary was a past burglary.

The extent of repeat burglary was so high that by
December most homes burgled earlier in the year
had been burgled at least once more. This level of
repeats was exceptional but clearly indicated the
value of counting repeats and understanding the
process that led to offense repetition.

A review of data collected in Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan, suggested that repeats tended to
occur soon after the last incident, most within 6
weeks.[4] This pattern has now been observed for a
number of offenses. For burglary, an additional
period of elevated risk extended about 4 months
after the first burglary. That period of increased
risk may reflect an "insurance effect": if
householders are insured and replace their goods,
after 4 months the burglar can be confident that
new goods are available.

Upon the authors' review of what victimization
surveys have told us about repeat victims, the
first surprise was how very little the reports of
such surveys addressed repeat victimization. The
second was how the design of such surveys tended
to understate repeats -- for example, by
limitations on the number of victimizations any
given victim was allowed to report and by
conventions about the maximum number of offenses
permissible to include in a series of similar
offenses.

Even so, analysis of British Crime Survey data
suggests that some 4 percent of victims suffered
about 44 percent of the offenses.[5] Those figures
are in no sense precise, but they do provide a
ballpark estimate of the substantial contribution
of repeat victims to crime counts. An unpublished
Stockholm victimization survey yields almost
identical findings.

The missing link

Most fascinating was the missing link in
victimization counts. Although victimization
surveys include such measures as the number of
victimizations per 1,000 population, they do not
mention how victimizations are concentrated
(number of crimes per victim). The concentration
measure is at least as important as others.

In the most victimized 10 percent of areas in
England, more than 30 times as much property crime
occurs as in the least victimized 10 percent.
However, even within the most victimized 10
percent of areas, just over half of the people
questioned had suffered no property crime during
the previous year. Of the almost half who had,
persons experienced an average of four such crimes
each. That suggests a crime problem very different
from one where high-crime areas differ only in the
number of victimizations per 1,000 population. In
fact, high-crime areas are such, to a very large
extent, because they have high rates of repeat
victimization.

If repeat victimization is so important, why have
the police not noticed? Shrewd officers often
have, but why the absence of substantial police
literature on repeats? The reasons may include the
following:

o The working lives of police officers are
fragmented. They do not have the continuity of
experience to make the necessary links.

o Police recording systems tend to be designed to
document events as if they were independent. Many
reasons explain why repeats are not identified as
such (subtly different spellings, changes of name,
different descriptions of the same location,
etc.).

o Many crimes remain unreported, with repeat
victims often less likely to notify police --
frequently for what victims regard as good
reasons, including avoidance of revisions or
terminations of insurance policies or
disillusionment with how police dealt with earlier
reports.

Why repeats?

Two basic reasons help explain the occurrence of
repeat victimizations.

The first pertains to risk assessment by
offenders. For example, the house with a
right-of-way behind it, and with an area of poor
housing beyond that, is likely to be regarded as a
low-risk opportunity by any passing burglar.

The second is that victimization itself makes a
repeat more likely. Common sense argues for an
offender to victimize a person more than once. A
burglar walking down a street for the first time
sees houses he presumes are suitable targets and
those he presumes are unsuitable. He successfully
burgles one home. The next time he walks down the
same street he sees not only houses he presumes
suitable or unsuitable but also one he knows is
suitable. Why not burgle the latter -- again? He
knows his way in and out of the home and knows the
value of either what he had to leave behind the
first time or what he anticipates has been
replaced through insurance.

Apart from common sense, the following is among
evidence supporting the authors' belief that past
victimization of a person plays an important role
in generating repeat crimes against him or her by
the same offender: interviews with burglars and
robbers reveal the surprising extent to which they
return to places they burgled and robbed before;
interviews with victims suggest the substantial
extent to which offense similarities indicate that
the same offender is involved; and a review of
cleared crimes shows the extreme rarity with which
different offenders are convicted of offenses
against the same target and the frequency with
which crimes cleared to a single offender exhausts
all crime against a single victim.[6]

Victimization-focused crime prevention

A number of crime prevention efforts in the United
Kingdom have been based on the prevention of
repeat victimization. For instance, one in
Liverpool looked at the prevention of repeated
domestic violence by use of alarms routed directly
to the police station (see "Domestic Violence Hot
Dots: Police Response"). In Huddersfield, domestic
burglary fell 24 percent over a 9-month period,
thanks in large part to reductions in repeat
burglaries.

To oversell the role of repeat victimization would
be foolish. Knowledge that a school or shop may
well be robbed does not necessarily enable
deployment of resources to prevent the crime.
Nonetheless, the temptation is to regard the
repeat-victimization approach -- after a period of
unmerited neglect -- as exciting and as an
integral component of crime prevention efforts.

Among the advantages of focusing crime prevention
on the recently victimized:

o Crime prevention is thus seen to be integral
with victim support. Victim support without crime
prevention denies practical help to the people in
most immediate need of it. Because the tradition
has been to reassure victims of the improbability
of crime recurring, dealing with the real
possibility that it might (and preventing it) is
the challenge for the integrated role.

o Repeat victimization defines a natural pace of
activity for prevention. Tracking offenses implies
constant (hopefully declining) effort. That is
referred to as drip-feeding crime prevention, in
contrast to on-again, off-again efforts.

o Repeat victimization is highest in areas of
highest crime. Put the other way around, areas are
high in crime substantially because of rates of
repeat victimization. Thus, deploying efforts to
and around repeat victims serves to direct efforts
to the areas in greatest need. One tactic is the
cocoon watch, whereby residents of the very few
houses in closest proximity to one burgled are
invited to watch for signs indicating attempts at
repetition.

o Concentration on preventing repeats underscores
the importance of detecting the offender and makes
detection an important component of prevention. If
the same offender returns, detection this time
confers a very particular benefit on the victim
and sends a very special message to the offender.

o Most crucially, thinking about repeats involves
changed perceptions. A police officer's visit to a
crime victim is directed at preventing the next
possible incident as well as addressing the
current one.

Questions and issues

Work on repeats is at an early stage of
development. Even the definition remains in
question. For example, does a repeat refer to a
location, a person, or both? The provisional
answer is that sometimes the distinction is
academic (as in house burglary and most domestic
violence). Sometimes, thinking in terms of a
location, such as one bay in a car park (the hot
dot in the hot spot), is more profitable. Most
contentiously, people may carry the risk of
violence around with them, and the unit of
analysis must be the person.

Over what period should we consider a victim at
relatively high risk for revictimization? Should
one attacked as a child be considered ever after
as at high risk for repeat victimization? Such a
lengthy time span may not be a helpful way of
approaching the issue. Equally problematic would
be to limit the period for revictimization to,
say, 1 month after an offense. The criterion
should be the period over which the same
presenting risk can be reduced; that is, before
the offenses are best viewed as independent.

Are offenses of different types but involving the
same victim best classified as repetitions? A case
has been made that, in racially motivated crime, a
diversity of acts against the same target must be
seen as related. A contrasting view is that
precautions tend to be crime specific, so why be
alert to cross-crime sequences where later and
different events would have been difficult to
prevent anyway?

However such issues are resolved, and however
halting the progress toward seeing crimes as
sequences, the repeat victimization approach to
crime prevention is beginning to change how
officers and others perceive police work.

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Notes

[1] Sparks, R.F., "Multiple Victimization: Evidence,
Theory and Future Research," Journal of Criminal
Law and Criminology, 72 (1981):762-78.

[2] See, for example, Farrell, G., "Preventing
Repeat Victimization," in Tonry, M., and D.P.
Farrington (eds), Building a Safer Society,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

[3] Forrester, D.P., et al., The Kirkholt Burglary
Prevention Project, Rochdale, Police Research
Group, Crime Prevention Unit Paper 13, London:
Home Office, 1988.

[4] Polvi, N., et al., "Repeat Break and Enter
Victimization: Time Course and Crime Prevention
Opportunity," Journal of Police Science and
Administration, 17 (1990):8-11.

[5] Farrell, G., and K. Pease, Once Bitten, Twice
Bitten: Repeat Victimization and Its Implications
for Crime Prevention, Police Research Group, Crime
Prevention Unit Paper 46, London: Home Office,
1993:6-7.

[6] Anderson, D., S. Chenery, and K. Pease, Biting
Back: Tackling Repeat Burglary and Car Crime,
Police Research Group, Crime Detection and
Prevention Series Paper 58, London: Home Office,
1995.

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Domestic Violence Hot Dots: Police Response

After research indicated that 43 percent (74) of
172 domestic violence incidents occurring over a
25-month period involved only about 7 percent (10)
of 1,450 households,* police took such steps as
the following to help prevent recurrence,
apprehend batterers, and enhance victims' sense of
security:

1. Development and distribution of neck-pendant
alarms to repeat victims (hot dots). When a person
presses the button on the pendant (or on the
associated equipment installed in the home), it
dials a central station that triggers a priority
response from police; opens a voice channel so
that officers can hear what is happening and
provide assurance that help is on the way; and
automatically displays on a police computer
monitor data about prior calls from the address --
information that is relayed to officers en route
to the reported incident.

2. Improvement in transfer of injunction
information from courts to police. Knowledge by
police of injunctions against batterers permitted
officers to arrive on the scene with a better
understanding of their powers regarding the
incident at hand. Written reminders of their
general powers in domestic violence incidents are
routinely distributed to officers.

3. Provision of support and information for
victims. Police employed a domestic violence
specialist, who developed safety plans for victims
and helped them improve their communication with
other agencies. Police also gave victims cards
containing domestic violence information.

Those measures above were warmly welcomed by
police and victims, and several arrests were made
as a result. One victim remarked that although she
is still nervous and on the alert, she feels "much
safer and secure" thanks to the alarm. Although
the efficacy of such initiatives as this is
difficult to demonstrate statistically, both
researchers and police were left in no doubt about
the project's worth.

*Lloyd, S., G. Farrell, and K. Pease, Preventing
Repeated Domestic Violence: A Demonstration
Project on Merseyside, Police Research Group,
Crime Prevention Unit Paper 49, London: Home
Office, 1994:2.

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Related NIJ Publications and Research

Listed below are selected NIJ publications related
to the topic addressed by this Research in Action.
The publications may be obtained free from the
National Criminal Justice Reference Service
(NCJRS): phone 800-851-3420, e-mail
askncjrs@ncjrs.org, or write NCJRS, Box 6000,
Rockville, MD 20849-6000. When free publications
are out of stock, photocopies are available for a
minimal fee or through interlibrary loan.
Publications may also be available electronically;
contact NCJRS for more information.

Earls, F.J., and A.J. Reiss. Breaking the Cycle:
Predicting and Preventing Crime. Research Report.
1994. 66 pp. NCJ 140541. Nontechnical discussion
of principal areas of a still ongoing longitudinal
study that, through tracing how criminal behavior
develops, seeks to identify potential prevention
and intervention strategies.

Miller, T.R., M.A. Cohen, and B. Wiersema. Victim
Costs and Consequences: A New Look. Research
Report. 1996. 28 pp. NCJ 155282. Presentation of
estimates of the costs and consequences, tangible
and intangible, of personal crime for Americans.

Policing Drug Hot Spots. Research Preview. 1996. 2
pp. FS 000128. Summary of an evaluation of a
city's innovative drug enforcement strategy (drug
market analysis), which focused on hot spots of
drug activity.

Victim Assistance Programs: Whom They Service,
What They Offer. Update. 1995. 2 pp. FS 000084.
Overview of findings of a survey of 319
full-service victim assistance programs in law
enforcement agencies and prosecutors' offices.

A recently completed NIJ-supported research effort
forms the basis of the second edition (forthcoming
about December 1996) of Serving Crime Victims and
Witnesses, which presents strategies for planning,
implementing, and refining victim assistance
programs. In preliminary stages, another NIJ
research project focuses on repeat victimization
in residential burglary.

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Ken Pease, Ph.D., is Professor of Criminology at 
the University of Huddersfield, England. Gloria
Laycock, Ph.D., is Head of the Home Office Police
Research Group, London.

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Points of view in this document do not necessarily
reflect the official position or policies of the
U.S. Department of Justice.

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The National Institute of Justice is a component of
the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes
the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims
of Crime.

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NCJ 162951