Ambient population and surveillance cameras: The guardianship role in street robbers' crime location choice

Abstract Understanding how offenders choose a crime location is a classic criminological topic. However, previous research on offenders' crime location choice did not consider the impacts of ambient population and surveillance cameras on street robbery. Based on the literature, this study integrates ambient population and surveillance cameras data, from the perspective of guardianship. The discrete spatial choice modeling is used to test the impact of their guardianship role on street robbers' crime location choice, accounting for accessibility and proximity, crime attractors and generators, and social disorganization. The results demonstrate that ambient population and surveillance cameras have a significant hindering impact on street robbers' crime location choice, and they play a guardianship role in street robbers' criminal activities. In particular, we find that the guardianship effect of ambient population is greater than that of surveillance cameras. Further, the inclusion of ambient population and surveillance cameras increases the fitness of the model, which underscores the guardianship role of these two factors on street robbers' choice of location on committing a robbery. These findings can have important implications for the role of the ambient population and the deployment of surveillance cameras for crime reduction.