Wim Bernasco

Wim Bernasco
Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR)

PhD

About

180
Publications
85,739
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6,476
Citations

Publications

Publications (180)
Article
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We investigate the spatial decision-making of graffiti writers when selecting target locations, examining how street segment characteristics influence exposure. Extending the rational choice perspective to expressive offending, we collected data through Systematic Social Observation in Ghent’s city center in November 2017, covering 12,655 graffiti...
Article
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Animal ethologists suggest that non-human primates console victims of aggression in a manner similar to humans. However, the empirical basis for this cross-species comparison is fragile, given that few studies have examined consolation behavior among humans. To address this gap, we revive and apply the underappreciated ethological branch of micro-s...
Article
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Studies investigating the role of single-parent families in adolescent delinquency have seldom differentiated between types of single-parent families. Furthermore, they have typically assumed that parental disruption is a discrete event marking an abrupt change between dual-parenthood and single-parenthood. Using Dutch longitudinal population regis...
Article
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This paper examines the recently theorized roles of the reliability and relevance of offenders’ knowledge of locations in their crime location choices. Using discrete choice models, we analyzed offenders’ pre-offense activity locations from police data (home addresses, family members’ home addresses, work, school, prior offenses, victimizations, no...
Article
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Objectives We aim to test the applicability of crime pattern theory in an Indian urban context by assessing the effects of offender residence, prior offending locations and presence of crime generators and crime attractors on where offenders commit offences. Methods The data comprise 1573 police-recorded snatching offenses committed by 1152 identi...
Article
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Understanding the relationships between individual offenders’ crime locations and their prior activity locations is important to enable individual level predictions to support crime prevention and investigation strategies. This study examined a wider range of crimes and activity locations than included in previous studies, to determine whether offe...
Article
Social scientists increasingly use video data, but large-scale analysis of its content is often constrained by scarce manual coding resources. Upscaling may be possible with the application of automated coding procedures, which are being developed in the field of computer vision. Here, we introduce computer vision to social scientists, review the s...
Article
This study developed and tested a new geographic profiling method for automating suspect prioritisation in crime investigations. The Geographic Profiling Suspect Mapping And Ranking Technique (GP‐SMART) maps suspects' activity locations available in police records—such as home addresses, family members' home addresses, prior offence locations, loca...
Preprint
Objective: While previous research agrees that third-parties often manage to de-escalate interpersonal conflicts when they intervene, we still know little about how they achieve this influence. The aim of the current study is to address this gap in the literature by investigating how third-parties de-escalate conflicts. Method: We conduct a two-par...
Article
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Objective: While previous research agrees that third-parties often manage to de-escalate interpersonal conflicts when they intervene, we still know little about how they achieve this influence. The aim of the present study is to address this gap in the literature by investigating how third-parties de-escalate conflicts. Method: We conduct a two-par...
Article
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Objectives The residential population of an area is an incomplete measure of the number of people that are momentarily present in the area, and of limited value as an indicator of exposure to the risk of crime. By accounting for the mobility of the population, measures of ambient population better reflect the momentary presence of people. They have...
Article
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Objectives We investigate the spatio-temporal variation of monthly residential burglary frequencies across neighborhoods as a function of crime generators, street network features and temporally and spatially lagged burglary frequencies. In addition, we evaluate the performance of the model as a forecasting tool.Methods We analyze 48 months of poli...
Article
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Addressing a gap in the extant literature on single-parent families and juvenile delinquency, we distinguish between different types of single-parent families. Using Dutch population register data on nearly 1.3 million children, we performed logistic regressions to assess the relation between growing up in a single-parent family before age 12 and t...
Preprint
Social scientists increasingly use video data, but large-scale analysis of its content is often constrained by scarce manual coding resources. Upscaling may be possible with the application of automated coding procedures, which are being developed in the field of computer vision. Here, we introduce computer vision to social scientists, review the s...
Article
Full-text available
In real-life violence, bystanders can take an active role in de-escalating conflict and helping others. Recent meta-analytical evidence of experimental studies suggests that elevated danger levels in conflicts facilitate bystander intervention. However, this finding may lack ecological validity because ethical concerns prohibit exposing participant...
Article
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Objectives The burgeoning field of individual level crime location choice research has required increasingly large datasets to model complex relationships between the attributes of potential crime locations and offenders’ choices. This study tests methods of sampling aiming to overcome computational challenges involved in the use of such large data...
Article
In order to explain how crimes are carried out, and why at a particular place and time and against a specific target, crime studies increasingly harness theory from behavioural ecology, in particular Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT). However, an overview of their main findings does not exist. Given the growing focus on OFT as a behavioural framework f...
Article
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Third parties tend to take an active role and intervene in interpersonal conflicts in public. Previous research has shown that the level of aggression of these interventions determines how they influence the conflict. No previous study has, however, systematically investigated whether the aggression of third-party interventions is influenced by the...
Article
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This article has been retracted. Please see the Retraction Notice for more detail: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-021-00143-y
Article
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Purpose Virus epidemics may be mitigated if people comply with directives to stay at home and keep their distance from strangers in public. As such, there is a public health interest in social distancing compliance. The available evidence on distancing practices in public space is limited, however, by the lack of observational data. Here, we apply...
Article
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It is well established that offenders' routine activity locations (nodes) shape their crime locations, but research examining the geography of offenders' routine activity spaces has to date largely been limited to a few core nodes such as homes and prior offense locations, and to small study areas. This paper explores the utility of police data to...
Article
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The interpretation of research findings based on self-reported delinquency requires knowledge of how response rates depend on the attributes of potential respondents, including their prior offending. The purpose of the present study was to quantify the extent to which, in a sample of offenders, the two main determinants of non-response – non-contac...
Article
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Objectives To empirically test whether offenders consider environmental features at multiple spatial scales when selecting a target and examine the simultaneous effect of neighborhood-level and residence-level attributes on residential burglars’ choice of residence to burglarize. Methods We combine data on 679 burglaries by 577 burglars committed...
Article
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Objectives To test the routine activity theory of deviance, we assess whether adolescents are most likely to use substances while they are involved in unstructured activities, in the presence of peers and in the absence of authority figures. We also test whether these situational factors interact. Methods A time use instrument was applied to colle...
Article
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This paper extends Crime Pattern Theory, proposing a theoretical framework which aims to explain how offenders' previous routine activity locations influence their future offence locations. The framework draws on studies of individual level crime location choice and location choice in non-criminal contexts, to identify attributes of prior activitie...
Article
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This study extends recent research on the spatial dynamics of neighbourhood disadvantage and youth offending. Data include self-reported offences from 794 Dutch adolescents and the socioeconomic status in their residential neighbourhood and the surrounding community. The findings reveal that youth engage in the highest levels of offending when they...
Article
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Guardians are a potential resource of conflict de-escalation but we still know little about their actual behaviour. In this article we investigate whom among the antagonists a guardian selects as a target when they intervene in an interpersonal conflict. We investigate this using CCTV footage from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) of 46 interpersonal con...
Article
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Many studies have investigated the relation between growing up in single-parent families and crime. However, an up-to-date overview of the literature on this topic is lacking. To fill this gap, this article reviews the empirical literature regarding the effects of being raised in a single-parent family on criminal behavior of adolescent offspring,...
Article
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Background There is general agreement that the frequency of crime decreases with the distance from the offender’s home. By way of exception to this distance decay pattern, the buffer zone hypothesis states that offenders avoid offending very close to home. The purpose of the present study was to assess the validity of this hypothesis. Methods We c...
Article
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Objective According to routine activity theory and crime pattern theory, crime feeds on the legal routine activities of offenders and unguarded victims. Based on this assumption, the present study investigates whether daily mobility flows of the urban population help predict where individual thieves commit crimes. Methods Geocoded tracks of mobile...
Article
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Smartphones enable passive collection of sensor data alongside survey participation. Location data add context to people’s reports about their time use. In addition, linking global positioning system data to self-reported time use surveys (TUSs) can be valuable for understanding how people spend their time. This article investigates whether and how...
Article
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Crime pattern theory predicts that offenders commit offences in their activity spaces. We also propose that they most likely offend in the more frequently visited parts. Previous studies used offenders’ residential areas or other activity space proxy measures but lacked data on other routinely visited places (e.g., work, school, and leisure activit...
Preprint
Are individuals willing to intervene in public violence? Half a century of research on the ‘bystander effect’ suggests that the more bystanders present at an emergency, the less likely each of them is to provide help. However, recent meta-analytical evidence questions whether this effect generalizes to violent emergencies. Besides the number of bys...
Article
Are individuals willing to intervene in public violence? Half a century of research on the 'bystander effect' suggests that the more bystanders present at an emergency, the less likely each of them is to provide help. However, recent meta-analytical evidence questions whether this effect generalizes to violent emergencies. Besides the number of bys...
Article
Full-text available
Half a century of research on bystander behavior concludes that individuals are less likely to intervene during an emergency when in the presence of others than when alone. By contrast, little is known regarding the aggregated likelihood that at least someone present at an emergency will do something to help. The importance of establishing this agg...
Article
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The influential microsociological theory of violence advanced by Randall Collins suggests that emotional dominance preconditions physical violence. Here, we examine robbery incidents as counterevidence of this proposition. Using 50 video clips of real-life commercial robberies recorded by surveillance cameras, we observed, coded, and analyzed the i...
Article
Full-text available
Half a century of research on bystander behavior concludes that individuals are less likely to intervene during an emergency when in the presence of others than when alone. By contrast, little is known regarding the aggregated likelihood that at least someone present at an emergency will do something to help. The importance of establishing this agg...
Article
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Crime pattern theory claims that busy places generate crime through immediate and delayed exploitation. In delayed exploitation, offenders notice criminal opportunities during opening hours but return to exploit them later. This study investigates delayed exploitation by testing whether soccer stadiums locally increase police recorded property crim...
Article
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Knowing where crime is likely to happen can help prevent it. Here I investigate whether two basic mechanisms of human mobility—preferential return and spatial exploration—explain and predict where offenders commit future crimes. A sample of 843 adolescents reported their hourly whereabouts during four days. In line with findings from other sources...
Data
Proximity of offense locations to offenders’ activity spaces (N = 165 offenses). (DOCX)
Data
Conditional logit estimates of model “Preferential return” (Fig 4). Descriptive statistics of the covariates are presented in S9 Table. (DOCX)
Data
Means, medians and statistical significance of Wilcoxon rank-sum tests of the radius of gyration of (1) non-responders, (2) non-compliers (3) non-offenders (4) offenders. (DOCX)
Data
Means, medians and statistical significance of Wilcoxon rank-sum tests of the real predictability of (1) non-responders, (2) non-compliers (3) non-offenders (4) offenders. (DOCX)
Data
Descriptive statistics of variables used in the conditional logit models (Fig 3, Fig 4, S14 Table). The total N is 165 (crimes) × 4558 (grid cells) = 752,070. All 17 variables are binary and have a minimum value of 0 and a maximum value of 1. (DOCX)
Data
Conditional logit estimates of model “+ prior crime” (Fig 4). Descriptive statistics of the covariates are presented in S9 Table. (DOCX)
Data
Map of time use by all participants. Overview of where the 843 participants spent over 6,700 hours during four days in each of the 4558 grid cells on land. Schools stand out as frequently visited locations, as they were places of convergence for the participants during the three weekdays recorded. (TIFF)
Data
Map of time use and offenses by offenders. Overview of where the 70 offenders spent over 81,000 hours during four days in each of the 4558 grid cells on land. Overlaid (in red) are the locations of the offenses they committed during four years after the time use space-time budget measurement. (TIFF)
Data
Example of the coding of variables. For a single random individual in the dataset, the maps shows how much time s/he spent in each 200x200m grid cell in the study area during the recorded four days (4x24 hours). The red grid cells constitute the individual’s activity space. The number of hours spent per grid cell is indicated by three shades of red...
Data
Total number of offenses per offender (N = 165 offenses). (DOCX)
Data
Means, medians and statistical significance of Wilcoxon rank-sum tests of the number of unique locations visited by (1) non-responders, (2) non-compliers (3) non-offenders (4) offenders. (DOCX)
Data
Means, medians and statistical significance of Wilcoxon rank-sum tests of the random predictability of (1) non-responders, (2) non-compliers (3) non-offenders (4) offenders. (DOCX)
Data
Means, medians and statistical significance of Wilcoxon rank-sum tests of the uncorrelated predictability of (1) non-responders, (2) non-compliers (3) non-offenders (4) offenders. (DOCX)
Data
Conditional logit estimates of model “+ prior crime exploration” (Fig 4). Descriptive statistics of the covariates are presented in S9 Table. (DOCX)
Data
Conditional logit estimates of model “+ opportunity” (Fig 3 and Fig 4). Descriptive statistics of the covariates are presented in S9 Table. (DOCX)
Data
The 76 × 67 grid of the study area. Orientation rotated for compatibility with common paper maps of The Hague. Grid cells in North Sea removed. The inset shows a detail of the map presented to participants. (TIF)
Data
Period between space-time budget interview and offense (N = 165 offenses). (DOCX)
Data
Conditional logit estimates of model “+ spatial exploration” (Fig 4). Descriptive statistics of the covariates are presented in S9 Table. (DOCX)
Data
Conditional logit estimates of a parsimonious version of the model “+ opportunity”. Distance from activity space and distance from prior crime are measured as the contiguity order of a grid cell, with a maximum of 7 for any grid cells beyond 6th order contiguity, and 0 for grid cells inside activity space and grid cells were the offender committed...
Article
Full-text available
Objective We present a first test using a smartphone time use survey app for whether the risk of criminal victimization is higher while traveling than during other activities, and assess risk heterogeneity between public transport, private transport by car, and private open-air transport. MethodsA sample of 1334 young adults completed a time-use su...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose This paper argues that cyber-dependent offending differs in important ways from other types of offending, which poses challenges to established life-course criminological explanations. Moreover, this study examines to what extent life circumstances in both private and professional life are differentially related to cyber-offending and tradi...
Article
Opportunity theories and ecological theories are commonly used to explain spatial crime patterns, but diurnal variations in these patterns have received little attention. Furthermore, the theories have been developed in Western countries, and it has remained unclear whether they are also applicable in China, and how their core concepts can be measu...
Article
Although the prevalence of cybercrime has increased rapidly, most victims do not report these offenses to the police. This is the first study that compares associations between victim characteristics and crime reporting behavior for traditional crimes versus cybercrimes. Data from four waves of a Dutch cross-sectional population survey are used (N...
Article
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In recent years, it has increasingly been recognized that due to the uncertain geographic context problem caused by daily human mobility, the residential population is too static to serve as a valid measure of the population at risk for criminal victimization. Various alternative measures have been suggested instead. Guided by the routine activity...
Article
Robberies are improvised encounters involving offender threat, sometimes force, and often victim resistance. While the association between threat, force, and resistance in robberies is well-established, sequential patterns are disputed due to biases of retrospective studies. To overcome these biases, we draw on CCTV camera recordings of 49 store ro...
Article
Objectives: The widespread use of camera surveillance in public places offers criminologists the opportunity to systematically and unobtrusively observe crime, their main subject matter. The purpose of this essay is to inform the reader of current developments in research on crimes caught on camera. Methods: We address the importance of direct obse...
Article
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Objectives The crime and place literature lacks a standard methodology for measuring and reporting crime concentration. We suggest that crime concentration be reported with the Lorenz curve and summarized with the Gini coefficient, and we propose generalized versions of the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient to correct for bias when crime data a...
Book
How offenders make decisions that lead to criminal conduct is a core element of virtually every discussion about crime and law enforcement. What type of information can deter a potential offender? For whom is the prospect of a sanction effective? How can emotions facilitate or impede crime? How does the availability of guns affect behavior in viole...
Chapter
Decision making is central to all human behavior, including criminal conduct. Virtually every discussion about crime or law enforcement is guided by beliefs about how people make decisions in one way or another. This interdisciplinary handbook integrates insights about the role of human decision making as it relates to crime. It contains reviews of...
Article
Full-text available
Post-aggression consolation is assumed to occur in humans as well as in chimpanzees. While consolation following peer aggression has been observed in children, systematic evidence of consolation in human adults is rare. We used surveillance camera footage of the immediate aftermath of nonfatal robberies to observe the behaviors and characteristics...
Data
Codesheet of dynamic variables during robbery. Partial ethogram of offender behavior. (DOCX)
Data
Logit analysis of consolation among 3650 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)
Data
Logit analysis of consolation among 3680 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)
Data
Logit analysis of consolation among 3390 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)
Data
Codesheet for dynamic variables during aftermath of robbery (ethogram). (DOCX)
Data
Logit analysis of consolation among 3680 dyads. Quadratic assignment procedure. (DOCX)
Data
ConsolationRobbery.csv (datafile). (CSV)
Data
Codesheet for static variables during aftermath of robbery. (DOCX)
Data
ConsolationRobberyStataCode.do (Stata script analysis). (DO)