NCJ Number
130444
Date Published
1990
Length
76 pages
Annotation
This Swedish study tested the theory that property crime is the product of four factors: the average mobility of persons in the society, the average quantity of accessible goods for these persons, the average population density in the subareas where the persons spend time, and the average probability of committing a crime when the opportunity presents itself to the persons.
Abstract
The latter probability factor was assumed to be strongly affected by social contacts. The nonlinear model was operationalized so that it could be compared with a linear model comprising the same variables. It was tested with register data for the municipalities in Sweden for the years 1975 and 1976. The number of property crimes, excluding frauds, reported to the police per 10,000 inhabitants was used as a measure of property criminality. The analyses were cross-sectional. The study found that the nonlinear model explained slightly more of the variance in property crime than did the linear model. The average density of the registered population had a strong positive linear relationship with property crime, and other societal characteristics that describe factors in the theoretical model also had linear relationships with property crime in the expected direction. 10 tables, 13 references, and appended supplementary information