Repeat Burglary in a Perth Suburb: Indicator of Short-term or Long-term Risk

Abstract: Two broad heuristic strategies have been employed to ex-plain the success of prior burglary experience in predicting future bur-glaries. Event dependency explanations (Tseloni and Pease, 1997) as-sign a causal role to prior burglaries in influencing subsequent burgla-ries, whereas risk heterogeneity explanations interpret prior burglaries as mere "markers " of preexisting and more fundamental risk factors. This study of burglary in a small suburb of Perth, Western Australia, highlights the importance of long-term burglary risk factors operating on a small geographic scale, as well as the short-term influence of prior burglary events. Different mechanisms are required to explain repeat burglary in distinct but adjacent parts of the suburb. The study em-ploys the Life Table method of survival analysis to examine the time course of repeat burglary and argues that survival methods provide a natural and well-developed statistical basis for the investigation of repeat victimisation