Journey-to-crime and offender’s geographic background: a comparison between migrant and native offenders in Beijing

Previous works on journey-to-crime research failed to examine the role of geographic background. This study investigates the journey-to-crime patterns of electric-bicycle thieves in Beijing. To examine the impact of geographic background on offenders’ travel behavior, the offenders are classified into native and migrant groups and their residing places into urban core and suburb areas. The native offenders who lived in urban core areas were found to make the shortest journey-to-crime trips; the offenders who lived in suburb areas, regardless of their migration status, traveled farther than their counterparts. Compared to the native offenders, the migrant offenders were more likely to make cross-boundary journey-to-crime trips, meaning that they make more trips from urban core areas to suburb or vice versa. Distance decay effect was revealed for all offender groups; but the effect is the strongest for the native offenders who lived in the urban core areas. In addition to the distribution of an offender’s activity anchor locations and the offense opportunities, we believe that an offender’s journey-to-crime trips are related to their spatial knowledge of the city. Our finding of the migrant offenders making longer journey-to-crime trips than their native offender counterparts may suggest that their trips are largely defined by their activity spaces and spatial awareness of the City when compared with the native offenders.