The effects of crime generators, crime attractors, and offender anchor points on the distribution of street robberies across the nearly 25,000 census blocks of Chicago are examined. The analysis includes a wide array of activities and facilities that are expected to attract criminals and generate crime. These include a variety of legal and illegal businesses and infrastructural accessibility facilitators. In addition to these crime attractors and generators, the role of the presence of motivated offenders’ anchor points, as measured by offenders’ residence and gang activity, is assessed. The analysis also includes crime attractors, crime generators, and offender anchor points in adjacent census blocks. The findings demonstrate the strength of the effects of crime generators and attractors and offender anchor points on the frequency of street robbery at the census block level.

This paper introduces the discrete spatial choice approach to the study of criminal target choice. The approach is used to assess whether residential burglars are attracted to target areas that are affluent, accessible, and poorly guarded. In addition, the importance of these criteria is postulated to vary across burglars. The theory is tested using data on 548 residential burglaries, committed by 290 burglars from the city of The Hague, the Netherlands. The likelihood of a neighbourhood’s being selected for burglary is heightened by its ethnic heterogeneity, its percentage of single-family dwellings, and its proximity to where the offender lives. The results and prospects of the discrete spatial choice approach for spatial target selection research are discussed.

Burglary victimization is associated with a temporary elevated risk of future victimization for the same property and nearby properties. Previous research suggests that often the initial and subsequent burglaries involve the same offenders. This paper tests this assertion, using data on detected residential burglaries during the period 1996—2004 in The Hague and its environs, in the Netherlands. It demonstrates that pairs of detected burglaries occurring in close proximity in space and time are much more likely to involve the same offenders than pairs that are not so related. Topics for future research and implications for the detection of burglaries are addressed.