Ashley N. Hewitt

Texas State University | TxSt · School of Criminal Justice and Criminology

Les études portant sur les crimes et les lieux ont toujours insisté sur l’importance de comprendre le profil spatial des crimes à l’aide d’unités d’analyse de plus en plus réduites. Même si de nombreuses études ont adopté cette perspective, peu se sont intéressées spécifiquement aux crimes à caractère sexuel. La présente étude se sert des données d...

Purpose The police often respond to persons who are not in direct violation of the law, but are rather undergoing behavioral crises due to mental illness or substance abuse disorders. The purpose of this study is to examine how police behavior influences civilian bystanders' emotional responses and perceptions of procedural justice (PPJ) when offic...

Objectives: Policing is in the midst of a legitimacy crisis. Procedural justice is a primary avenue for police reform, including when police officers interact with vulnerable populations. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the nuanced circumstances in which the public may endorse police interactions with persons in crisis as more or l...

Purpose The duration of time that the serial offender remains free in the community to commit murders may be seen as a direct measure of their longevity; a sign of their success. The aim of this study is to predict the duration of the serial homicide series by examining the factors that contribute to the length of time a serial murderer is able to...

The security hypothesis posits that the international crime drop can be attributed to, in large part, improvements in security technology. However, in recent years, certain types of property crime are increasing. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that offenders are adapting to increased security in vehicles through burglarizing residences to st...

The crime and place literature has consistently emphasized the importance of understanding spatial patterns of crime using increasingly smaller spatial units of analysis. Despite the growing number of studies that have used this perspective, very few of them have investigated sexual offenses specifically. The current study uses police event data to...

Alternatives to population-based crime rates were first introduced in 1965. Activity-based crime rates derive numerator data from activity-specific crime events, then match these to time spent in the same activities. Activity-based rates can produce a vastly different picture of risk, not captured by population-based rates. Given that numerator and...

Background While the presence or absence of previous healthcare and criminal justice system (CJS) contacts in the histories of mentally ill offenders has been well-studied, the frequency of these contacts and when they occur in the period leading up to an index criminal event has received less research attention. Aims To explore patterns of health...

Purpose – Early classification systems of fire setting have suffered from several limitations, including the lack of empirical validation and the focus mainly on the offender motivation behind this type of crime. More recent research shows that looking at the crime scene behaviors may present a more fruitful approach for helping to solve fire setti...

Despite environmental criminologists emphasizing the role that both space and time play in the occurrence of crime, there is still only a small literature on the temporal rhythms of criminal behavior, especially those of sexual violence. Drawing from routine activities theory, this research uses circular statistics to investigate the temporal patte...

Les études portant sur les crimes et les lieux ont toujours insisté sur l’importance de comprendre le profil spatial des crimes à l’aide d’unités d’analyse de plus en plus réduites. Même si de nombreuses études ont adopté cette perspective, peu se sont intéressées spécifiquement aux crimes à caractère sexuel. La présente étude se sert des données d...

Purpose: To examine the variability in the journey-to-crime and journey-to-victimization in stranger rapes when disaggregated by offender motive. Using crime pattern theory as the theoretical framework, a series of pre-offense factors are used to explain these differences. Methods : Two-step cluster analysis is first used to identify motive subtyp...

Purpose To examine the variability in the ‘journey-to-crime’ and ‘journey-to-victimization’ in stranger rapes when disaggregated by offender motive. Using crime pattern theory as the theoretical framework, a series of pre-offense factors are used to explain these differences. Methods Two-step cluster analysis is first used to identify motive subty...

Recent research has shown that crime-related police calls for service account for 20–30% of police call-related activity. In this article, we analyse temporal patterns of calls for police service relating to mental health. Approximately, 22,000 mental health-related calls are analysed. Seasonal, monthly, and daily patterns are analysed using ANOVA...

Purpose Investigating the day of week and hour of day temporal patterns of crime typically show that (late) nights and weekends are the prime time for criminal activity. Though instructive, mental-health-related calls for service are a significant component of police service to the community that have not been a part of this research. The purpose o...

The current study investigates gender differences in the spatial distribution of the British Columbia Mental Health Act (MHA), criminal and non-criminal police calls-for-service involving emotionally disturbed persons (EDP). Using a sample of 4341 police incidents over a three-year period, 13 pairwise spatial comparisons of similarity were complete...

Sexual murderers perpetrate homicide and rape/sexual abuse, but it is unclear whether they should primarily be considered homicide offenders, sexual offenders, or both. Most studies have merged together different types of non-homicidal sex offenders (NHSOs), neglecting to consider the potential differences between the nonviolent and violent sex off...

Past research on the spatial mobility of serial offenders has generally found that these individuals make calculated decisions about the ways in which they come into contact with suitable victims. Within the geographic profiling literature, four victim-search methods have been theorized that describe how serial predatory offenders hunt for their vi...

A subset of persons with mental illness is at risk for becoming involved with the police, and an even smaller subset of emotionally disturbed persons (EDP) has multiple contacts over time. Not much is known, however, about the nature of these contacts and how the patterns of everyday life can lead to the initial contact with, and type of police res...

Using data from qualitative interviews and police reports, latent class analysis is used on a sample of 54 repeat stranger sexual offenders who committed 204 sexual assaults to identify discrete contexts present at the time of victim encounter that influence these offenders' decision to use more than one location to commit their crimes. Five distin...

Purpose Using the rational choice perspective, the current study investigates the impact that the environment and offending behavior have on serial sexual crime event outcomes. Methods The effects of time and place factors, as well as offender modus operandi strategies, on sexual crime event outcomes are tested using Generalized Estimating Equatio...

A series of stranger sexual assaults poses considerable obstacles for law enforcement officials. One such preoccupation is concerned with whether or not the offender will escalate in the severity of his behaviours with subsequent victims. The current study uses transition matrices to address whether or not the offending patterns of 72 serial strang...

Purpose Factors influencing crime location choices are not only significant to rape investigations, but they are especially important for geographic profiling. The purpose of the current study is to use temporal, hunting behavior, and modus operandi factors to determine those variables that influence the victim encounter and release locations in se...