LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 43 – Pandemic Era Guardianship & Routine Activity Theory ft. Dr. Marcus Felson (Texas State University) Part 1

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Dr. Marcus Felson, Professor at Texas State University, joins us for two episodes of LPRC CrimeScience. In this first conversation with Dr. Felson, we cover guardianship with an emphasis on the current pandemic, research ideas, routine activity theory, and much more. The post CrimeScience Episode 43 – Pandemic Era Guardianship & Routine Activity Theory ft. Dr. Marcus Felson (Texas State University) Part 1 appeared first on Loss Prevention Research Council.

Hi everyone, welcome to Crime Science. In this podcast, we aim to explore the science of crime and the practical application of the science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. Co-host Dr. Reed Hayes of the Loss Prevention Research Council and Tom Meehan of Control Tech discuss a wide range of topics with industry experts, thought leaders, solution providers, and many more. On today's episode, Dr. Marcus Felsen of Texas State University discusses recommended pandemic-era behavioral guardianship research ideas and suggestions and routine activity theory with the LPRC. This is part one of our conversation with Dr. Felsen. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. Be a leader in loss prevention by implementing integrated solutions that enhance safety, reduce shrink, and help to improve merchandising, operations, and customer service. Bosch integrated security and communication solutions span zones one through four in the LPRC's zones of influence, while enriching the customer experience and delivering

valuable data to help increase retail profitability. Learn more by visiting Bosch online at boschsecurity.com. Welcome everybody to another episode of Crime Science, the podcast. This morning, I'm joined by Dr. Marcus Felsen of Texas State University. But I've known Marcus since he was at USC and at Rutgers as well. I know, Marcus, you're very much in demand right now, and so we're excited to have you on board today. right now. And so we're excited to have you on board today. This podcast goes out globally and to retail loss prevention, asset protection practitioners, law enforcement, and to the criminology community at large. So welcome aboard and thank you for joining us this morning, Marcus. Okay. Glad to be here. Yeah, I'll go ahead, Marcus, and ask you a few questions here. I think to first off, just to lay down some basic understanding for the listener,

maybe just walk us through a little bit about the original routine activity perspective and then how it's evolved. I know that the triangle, if you will, that portrays routine activity, evolved. I know that the triangle, if you will, that portrays routine activity, it has evolved a little bit in different ways. But maybe just walk us through how it came together and how it's evolved in your short version. Well, it started in 1979 and actually a couple of years before when I was trying to study crime rate trends. And what I found is that the traditional criminological theories just were not working because crime rates were going up dramatically, tripling rates and quadrupling and that sort of thing. But the usual theories weren't explaining it. Poverty was decreasing, not increasing. There was no change in the percent of the population, black, essentially no change.

There were all of the usual things that people associated with crime were just not working. So I knew I had to figure out what was going on. And I tried the age structure, which was indeed younger during that period, but it was only a 30% increase in the key ages, while there are 300 or 400% increases in the crime rates. So the age structure couldn't simply explain. You could say that 30% more youths proportionally would produce more offenders and more victims, and that could multiply and help explain what's going on. But basically, I realized I had to make a distinction, a couple of distinctions in order to understand the process.

The first is to distinguish victim from target. first is to distinguish victim from target. Um, a, if you're someone breaks in your house, your house may be the target, even though you feel you're the victim, the person who broke in may not, might not, uh, most likely has nothing against you personally. They just want money or So I started thinking in terms of target rather than victim. And I distinguished three elements, offender, target, guardian. That is, a likely offender had to find a suitable target in the absence of a capable guardian against crime. And I realized that guardians were not usually police. They were usually everyday citizens. In other words, you were not home to watch your house,

and maybe the neighbor on each side wasn't home. So the lack of guardians was in reference not to guards, not to police, not to private guards, but rather ordinary citizens. So in formulating that, I realized that we had to look at all three and their convergence and divergence. So crime is more likely to occur if target and guardian are together in the absence. I'm sorry, if offender and target are together in absence of a guardian. Also, that means that all three elements are almost necessary.

Now, there are some exceptions. A robbery, a face-to-face robbery, the word robbery usually means face-to-face. So the offender, therefore, comes into direct contact with the target of the crime but there's nobody to help the target, nobody to help the victim, in this case it really is a victim so sometimes the victim is an absent guardian and sometimes the victim is a target who's present. Well, okay, there's three elements.

And that helped explain crime much better than having an offender and victim or just offender. So it was a basic shift in how we think about crime and how we study crime rate trends. What I found is that there were dramatic increases in crime targets during that period, which was from 1947, really from the 1960s through the 70s. There were many more lightweight televisions to steal, a lot of cash out, a lot of people going out and going to restaurants and bars and so forth. And so I documented all that and then concluded that the changes in routine activities were driving the crime rate trends. This explained a lot. It had a lot of trouble getting published, and there was a lot of resistance to it.

Many people who study crime are offender-oriented and aren't focusing on targets or on absence of guardians. And so there was a great deal of resistance to it. Now, what has happened since is people working on this have elaborated the routine activity approach, and there are no longer just three elements, offender, target, guardian. The elaborations have included places, because places are important. And there's also been an elaboration, the concept of supervision, that supervision to prevent crime has been elaborated, so we now think of three types of supervision. One is to supervise people, another is to supervise places, and another is to supervise things, particularly guardians, but it might be also people who are targets of crime. but also people who are targets of crime. So that has led to a crime triangle. And the crime triangle was put together based on an article that I did,

but also it was put together by John Eck. And the inner triangle is offender target and place. So for a crime to occur, the offender needs a place to carry it out, and he needs a target. And so now these are kind of roles. So sometimes there's the same, the target is a place, like a burglary, and other times the, so, you know, the crime triangle has six elements. The inner triangle is offender, target, and place. The outer triangle has to do with supervision.

Supervision of the potential offenders is carried out by handlers. And a handler might be your parents, it might be your teachers and whoever is kind of keeping you from committing offenses. The places are supervised by place managers, such as bartenders and apartment managers, people who work in the store and so forth. And the targets are supervised by others. Sometimes the same person is doing multiple roles, but the target is typically supervised by the person who owns it. So you're looking after your own purse or wallet and so forth. So what an offender has to do to carry out a crime is, first of all, he's got to get away from his parents and others who would interfere.

Second, he's got to find a place where nobody's watching or whoever is supposed to be watching isn't or can't or is distracted. And then in that place, he has to find a target with nobody walking the target. And so this gives us understanding of the necessary or most likely conditions for crime to occur. And this is very general, applies to many different types of crime. It also helps us evaluate trends, because if any of those elements or their combinations changes, that can produce a major change in crime. And it also tells us that you can have a major crime increase without having more offenders.

The offenders can have more crime opportunities. And so that changes really very much how we think about crime. One thought I had, Marcus, a colleague asked me to kind of weigh in that wasn't on that list. A couple of questions, if I might, and see what your thoughts are before we get there. And one is the idea that the cops and courts fallacy, and a little bit about that. And you touched on it a few minutes ago when you talked about that most guardians are not, in fact, you know, law enforcement officers or even security guards. But what differences, what subtle differences even, but important ones, might exist between a law enforcement officer, for example, or somebody that happens to be employed by that place or a frequent visitor or other guardian role?

Do you see subtle differences? Okay. Well, first of all, people watch too much television and get too much of the crime information from the unusual situations on TV. Second, interestingly, police are vulnerable themselves to that, and to particularly new police who don't yet have the experience to realize how little control they have over the crime rate and over the larger situation. And the most important thing is recognizing that everyday guardianship is carried out by everyday people whose presences and absences are the center for a crime opportunity.

Police are only a backup. Even private guards are a backup. And when they get there, it's likely to be far too late to stop the crime or even apprehend the offender. So we really should analyze crime mainly in terms of everyday citizens, their crime opportunities as offenders, their ability to act as guardians, and also the potential that they are targets, and certainly that their property is targets. And when you analyze it this way and start from at the very outset, recognizing the limits of police and courts, you get much better understanding.

And one of the things I find is that when I have experienced police in class, they have no trouble accepting this. They understand this. Very new police might not understand this, and the public might have trouble, might have resistance to this. But generally speaking, when you explain it to people, they pick up on it. So that's very helpful. And I think it does now help us segue into the discussion about, okay, we've got the routine activity perspective, where it came from, why you developed it, and then

the enhancements as a lot of smart people, in addition to yourself, have thought about and tested it and applied the concepts. Now let's look at, here we are, we're in the eye of the storm, we're in the pandemic. I know I'm on an email string with you and 100 other criminologists that evolved from the ECA, the environmental criminology group that you were the starter of, the founder of. And so I know there's a lot of thought. I didn't strictly speaking found it, but I've been there almost all the time. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. So it's a great active group, and you're playing a leadership role, though, in a lot of the thinking and discussion.

So if we could, let's talk about routine activity. How do we use that? How do we think differently during the pandemic? And then how do we leverage it, the concepts, going forward? Okay. Well, the pandemic is a terrible thing. And I know we're all threatened and I know there are people worried about this. I have to say, in a way, this is a terrible thing to say, but the pandemic is really a natural experiment for testing the routine activity approach to crime rate analysis. There is almost no greater experiment than this.

transforms routine activities as people sequester themselves or are ordered off the streets, etc. And so we get to see the consequence of that for a variety of crimes. And the good thing scientifically about an experiment this dramatically. And again, I emphasize that we are in the midst of a terrible tragedy, so to look at one's own theory is in a way deeply selfish. But I'm trying to divert from the tragedy and just look at it as this way as I can. And you don't need the control variables. One problem we have in criminology and in other fields like it is there are too many variables, too many theories. And so it's actually hard to study people when you have the spaghetti tangling together.

But there are such dramatic changes in routine activities that this is the dominant factor. And you can almost leave out other control variables other than day or week and hour of day. And in this situation, there are dramatic changes in numbers of people at home. And in this situation, there are dramatic changes in numbers of people at home. Dramatic declines in restaurants where there's either nobody allowed there and they're closed or very few people going and some may be open. Dramatic changes in travel. Far fewer people out and about and driving around and so on. Dramatic changes in the number of people working.

And schools closed. So you could have no more dramatic changes in changing routine activities. You also know the dates that they closed. And in the United States, there'll be 50 states plus the District of Columbia, each with a little different pattern. And in other countries, there are different patterns, too. And so we can look, and I've already done this for some cities, as have others, where we look and see when the close-downs began and what it did to crime rates. And sure enough, you find dramatic changes in crime rates. I can give you a general picture of those changes.

I have to make a preliminary statement that the evidence we have is sketchy and often anecdotal, although some of it is quantitative and reported by police departments and others, but it's not clean data, so they aren't official reports. But one of the things you find is that when changes are dramatic, anecdotal reports become more valuable and unclean data becomes more valuable because they aren't small

effects and they aren't that subject to minor errors because the major trends are so big. By the way, I've been coughing for a year, but I find my cough scares people now. And there are other changes like this where something that was happening all along is amplified in this environment. But now let's go back to some of the changes I'm picking up from various people around the world. First is there's a major shift of burglary from residential to business burglary, with residential burglaries going down greatly from 20 to 50 percent around there probably. And that's because people are home.

It's hard to do a residential burglary. In contrast, commercial burglary may be going up, especially as the lockdowns drag on. Because what happens is the businesses and industries are closed down and they have property there worth stealing. And in particular, I would be on the lookout for those business and industry properties that are near residential areas. So it's easy to slip over there and break in and steal something. I'm already looking at this. We're trying to get some indication of it. There are also changes in issues about assault.

The pattern appears to be a major decline in assaults away from home. Major declines like 30, 40 percent. And major declines in robbery, like 30, 40 percent decline in robbery, which is mostly away from home. However, assaults, domestic violence becomes an issue because people are spending more time at home engaging in domestic violence but is home more. The victim, usually a wife or a girlfriend, is there. She may be subject to greater risk with more time at home.

However, it may be harder for her to report. So there's a reporting issue. And the reporting issue even applies to victim surveys. If you called and did a victim survey and the offender is there, it's harder to report. The domestic violence initially appeared not to be going up. Then we're now getting reports from multiple occasions that it has gone up in a major way, perhaps 20, 30 percent or more. We do not yet have data on the relationship of the domestic violence offender and victim or how it was reported. It may be that somebody heard screams, a neighbor, and that sort of thing. And so those are some of the major changes we're hearing.

The mapping of the hotspots are going to be changing with the entertainment district. No longer a hotspot and no longer a hotspot at night. And those are the things to be on the lookout for. Now, some other reports I'm getting have to do with disorderly conduct. And here's what I'm discerning. And there's a good deal of, there some there's some speculation in this but i'm picking up some reports and i believe this may be a major change the major shifts in um in uh the types of reports for disorderly conduct and for public disorder.

Two shifts I'm picking up from people. First one is there are probably major increases in conflicts between police and citizens as it tells citizens what not to do or to go home. And then if they get resistance or problems with them, they are likely to record that as resisting arrest or as disorderly conduct. and so you're going to have some of those, and more than just a few. It may be 40% increases in some places. The second thing that you have is that in residential areas, there are some spillovers of local conflicts into the streets, whether it's within household conflicts that spill over or spill out, or whether it's conflicts between proximate neighbors that spill out. And so some of those appear to be occurring, and that's anecdotal. And we have to wonder whether the data are designed to measure that.

But it might require hotspot analyses and looking at the hotspots in different ways. What I'm doing and recommending is that you have three periods. You compare before people started locking down, well the period in between, while they're starting to, and the period afterwards when they're settled down in isolation or relative isolation and see how the rates change in those periods. periods. There are also organized crime changes with the borders shut and people not moving about, and it's harder to ship contraband across borders and even within a country. So there are changes there. There are transit changes, and some of those changes may, they can go in either direction. On the one hand, there are fewer people traveling and exposed to risk, but on the other hand, there are fewer guardians. So if you're caught alone with someone, you might be in some danger. And I'm wondering about a number of things. I'm

wondering about whether teenagers are hanging out. There's also an issue of homeless people. are hanging out. There's also an issue of homeless people. I got a report from Seattle, and this is anecdotal, that the homeless people are expanding the areas they hang out because the business is gone, the entertainment is gone, so they just move in. And whether that improves or makes things worse, I can't tell. Maybe they're able to social distance, and it cuts the spread of the disease. Maybe they're not bothering anybody and so forth. But it is an issue, and when this is all over, that issue will have to be faced. And a lot of, in fact, the issue is opening up a lot of shortcomings in society and making us face up to some of them.

So I think this is all critical information. And what we're trying to do today, Marcus, is help particularly the practitioners think broadly first, you know, routine activity. What are offenders? What are changes? What are changes in targets? But just as critically or maybe even more so, what are changes in guardianship that are taking place at the different areas and different venues with the different targets that we're talking about. And so that's really what's so important here is that we zoom out and then we zoom in and then we zoom back out and so on. Working on a paper I was just going to run by, I just sent you actually while we've been talking, but a colleague of mine,

talking, but a colleague of mine, Basha, has been working on a paper and just looking at LA because there's so much activity there and it's fairly well documented. But looking at the difference between retail environments, which is, of course, the main focus here, and overall citywide, even other commercial entities, but seeing in burglary, 64% increase in retail burglary at the same time, all burglaries down actually 10%. And so that kind of clustering vandalism up 67%, up 13% overall, but in retail environments up 13%. And then what you might expect in that shoplifting is down 71% in felony and 24% the smaller. Now, that's likely to be not representative of all the types of retailers. And so we're seeing what you can imagine, including robbery now. So robbery spiked as well, retail and overall citywide, but the commercial robbery is now clustered where we would expect under your prevailing theory now

where those supermarkets, convenience, dollar stores that are essential stores that people are visiting now where we've got people and targets clustered and more available and guardianship all over the place. So maybe if I might go back over to you and, you know, some of your thoughts around guardianship, how guardianship's changing in the commercial spaces as well as the residential. And you touched on a little bit with people are home now. What I can do, I can't answer your question except to say be on the lookout for this or that. First, be on the lookout for the delivery versus pickup versus entry in the store. Those are three categories.

Entry in the store is very different from picking it up yourself, and that's very different from having delivery. And they're going to have different guardianship issues. If it's delivery, then the guy subject to risk is the delivery guy, but usually he or she isn't carrying cash because it's paid in advance online. That may be true of pickup as well. Entering the store is different, but if people are spaced out, then that affects guardianship. The more likely issues of guardianship may have to do with, um, uh, the mix. And this is what I think is

crucial, the mixed land use versus segregated land use. If the commercial and industrial properties that make good targets are physically separate from the residential areas. Then somebody's got to drive there or take public transit there, and public transit might not be available to those areas. So there might not be crime opportunities other than attacking commercial and industrial targets that are within your own residential zone. So mixed land use residential zones then provide the greatest opportunity for offending. And the guardianship might be there for the closest stores, but not necessarily the ones that are a couple of blocks away. So that's something I would think about. And there's another thing I would think about, the evasion process.

There are people evading the controls. And that's important from a disease standpoint, but also from a crime standpoint. And I will mention one thing to be on the lookout for checking on teen hangouts. Teen hangouts in urban places or suburban places tend to be particular corners or by a mini mall. Even if the mini mall is now closed or only one store is open, let's say a food store, there still may be teens hanging out on the side. And unless police notice them and scatter them, really, they may still go there and they may still evade parents. So we don't know whether they're doing that.

And we don't know whether they'll break into those stores. It may be the mini malls will have more vulnerability than the malls, and that's an empirical question. The other thing I want to mention is that in Northern Europe, there are rural and semi-rural youth hangouts. rural and semi-rural youth hangouts. They're called barns or sheds. And in Holland, they occur, and that's where teenagers basically go to get drunk.

And they may use drugs, and they socialize, and they have a party, and some young adults as well. Now, are those sheds or barns empty now? Are kids going there? Are some of the kids going there? Are some of the youths going there? Are they getting in trouble or not? Are they spreading disease or not? And I don't know that,

but the social urges are very powerful and sometimes overpower the calculations of risk from disease. Very helpful and good macro and micro look at what we're up against. Thanks for listening to the Crime Science Podcast presented by the Loss Prevention Research Council and sponsored by Bosch Security. If you enjoyed today's episode, you can find more Crime Science episodes and valuable information at lpresearch.org. The content provided in the Crime Science Podcast

is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal, financial, or other advice. Views expressed by guests of the Crime Science Podcast are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or positions of the Office of Prevention Research Council.