Crime Generator and Crime Attractor
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Crime events are among the most outstanding legal issues taking most law enforcement officers’ precious time. The LEOs have to continually patrol to ensure that such activities are minimal for the order to prevail in society. However, what has gotten the researcher’s attention is that certain places have a higher prevalence of such events than others. Over time the researchers have tried to find the contributing factors to such disparity, resulting in the development of terminologies to explain the disparity. Therefore it is essential to discuss some of the terminologies developed, such as crime generators and crime attractors, and their influence on policing and crime analysis.
Crime generators refer to places that are likely to attract many people for reasons not related to a criminal incentive. Examples of crime generators include sporting events, transportation hubs, festivals, and shopping places. These areas are high crime generators because they are likely to bring potential victims and offenders together (Demeau & Parent, 2018). Meanwhile, crime attractors refer to areas providing crime opportunities that the offenders are already familiar with. People with criminal drive often get attracted to such sites. As such, even offenders who have not residents of the area can quickly relocate to such places after observing some circumstances for long periods of time. Examples of such locations include drug and prostitution areas, as well as some entertainment spots (Demeau & Parent, 2018). Such places are crime attractors because their reputation spreads quickly, drawing many offenders’ attention, consequently increasing the number of disorder and c events.
When it comes to crime analysis, potential crime attractors and generators serve to provide the police district with spatiotemporal details from which it draws inferences regarding the likelihood of a crime occurring in that area. All those provide several benefits to the police district (Brantingham, Brantingham & Andresen, 2017). It is depicted that when a hot spot or near-repeat is analyzed exclusively based on the physical place, i.e., a specific street block, it helps in alienating the emergence of a crime incident from the environmental framework that nurtures the conditions for that particular crime incident. For instance, when robbery incidents are reported to be happening in the early morning on a street block, it might be easier for the police district to relate the crime incidents to the early operating hour of a light rail station nearby (Brantingham et al., 2017). That illuminates how the site’s features and the surrounding area mutually contribute to the high crime rate.
Moreover, the knowledge that crime clusters are likely to be in certain areas than others facilitates focusing policing efforts on places rather than persons. This strategy is more time and cost effective as it provides a small number of targets for police operations, consequently reducing the disorder and offenses in particular areas (Song et al., 2017). Based on this knowledge concerning the influence of environmental context on crime rates, crime analysts can focus on analyzing spatiotemporal settings that enhance the conditions for crime concentration at micro places. That way, they will help their police department answer why a particular area is a hot spot. Moreover, crime generators and attractors should be presented in figures and rates (Song et al., 2017). That way, it becomes easier for their police department to diagnose the type of mechanism that might be operating.
Generally, it is essential to note that most crimes are planned, or they leverage prevailing opportunities. Meaning, crimes are not random, and they occur when several factors that are in their favor coincide, for instance, when potential victims and offenders happen to be in the same place or target areas. Therefore, a better understanding of the conditions that favor the crimes in various places remains a critical task for the LEOs.
References
Brantingham, P. J., Brantingham, P. L., & Andresen, M. A. (2017). The geometry of crime and crime pattern theory. Environmental criminology and crime analysis, 2.
Demeau, E., & Parent, G. (2018). Impacts of crime attractors and generators on criminality in Montreal. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 60(3), 387-412.
Song, J., Andresen, M. A., Brantingham, P. L., & Spicer, V. (2017). Crime on the edges: Patterns of crime and land use change. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 44(1), 51-61.