Suburb boundaries and residential burglars (2003)

In examining home addresses of burglars and the addresses of their targets, this study found that burglars did not, as expected, work in their own neighbourhood. Most burglars (77%) travelled away from their home suburb to do their work, travelling an average of five kilometres to their target. There was evidence that physical boundaries separating suburbs, such as carriageways and parkland, acted as barriers inhibiting burglars' movement. This has important implications for both urban design and crime prevention. Adam Graycar Director A growing trend both in Australia and overseas is the expansion of protected communities. Devised to reassure residents concerned with growing urbanisation, traffic and fear of crime, these types of neighbourhood attempt to return a sense of community through exclusion of outsiders and a reduction in through traffic (Blakely & Snyder 1997). They may seek to use formal and informal barriers to achieve these aims or, in more extreme cases, employ private security guards to protect private areas that used to be public space. Fear of crime is often a motivating factor in the creation of gated communities (Wilson-Doenges 2000) and in the design characteristics of local areas. There would certainly appear to be a growth in gated communities in Australia (Kerr 2001). The idea of reintroducing a sense of community to a neighbourhood may resound with a public increasingly concerned with crime and disorder. There is appeal in the idea of a suburban neighbourhood where children play in the street and everyone leaves their doors unlocked. The desire to live in an environment with a solid sense of community is strong, and focusing on the neighbourhood or suburb as the appropriate scale of structural change is not uncommon. Broadbrush city wide tactics may not be suitably tailored for a particular community, while strategies that are too localised may be costly. Indeed, the appropriate geographical scale in crime prevention strategies is often determined by available funds or administrative boundaries rather than the most effective range for implementation and success. In the case of burglary, certain strategies, such as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and Neighbourhood Watch, have a particular geographical range. They are often neither cost-effective at the individual property level (micro-level) nor at the citywide scale (macro-level), though few rigorous cost-benefit evaluations of situational crime prevention studies have been completed (Chisholm 2000; Walsh & Farrington 2001, p. 115). But are communities that are designed to exclude outsiders effective in reducing crime? In regard to gated communities studied in the United States, the answer would appear to be no (Blakely & Snyder 1997; Wilson-Doenges 2000). Few gated community residents report an increased sense of community (often the reverse in fact) and crime levels have remained unchanged. This paper examines the offender behaviour patterns of residential burglars to demonstrate why protected communities are less likely to provide the protection from outsiders that residents seek. Although there are far fewer protected communities in Australia, we examine here the behaviour patterns of burglars in Canberra, a city that while not yet containing gated communities, incorporates a number of similar design elements. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications for the scale of crime prevention strategies. The Importance of Geography in Offender Behaviour An understanding of the decisionmaking strategies of burglars reinforces the importance of geography, both real and perceived, in the risk of victimisation. Real (that is, physical) geography creates an obstacle of distance over which an offender must travel from a home address or other base to the crime site and back. Increased distance has the effect of increasing effort and escalating the risk of apprehension. …