Itinerant crime groups: mobility attributed to anchor points?

The near home hypothesis and distance decay pattern appear to be of high relevance for the analysis of the journey made to commit crime. Most offenders tend to travel greater distances only when they have certain reasons to do so. However, this does not mean that mobile offenders do not exist. Criminal statistics indicate that Eastern European multiple offenders tend to travel further than others. Their average travelled distance is greater and their distance decay pattern is different. This observation is not completely new. Law enforcement agencies have focused on this phenomenon since the end of the 1990s. One hypothesis concerning the crime travelling behaviour of these groups is that they do not have fixed residences, hence creating the image of them travelling larger distances. The central question of this paper is therefore whether high offender mobility is derived from anchor point flexibility. While home is (too?) often considered the logical anchor point of crime travelling behaviour, this could eventually prove to be incorrect. By studying a limited number of case files, a first glance is taken at the interpretation of the anchor point for these groups: the question hereby is whether a case-to-case interpretation of these anchor points offers an explanation for the distances travelled. Although residences of itinerant crime groups are not always easy to assess, the results indicate that they do indeed travel large distances. This is still the case when the anchor points of these groups are studied more thoroughly