LPRC - CrimeScience Episode 64 – Choice, Crime, and Evidence-Based Prevention featuring Dr. John Eck (University of Cincinnati) Part 2

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Dr. John Eck, Professor at the University of Cincinnati, joins Dr. Read Hayes on the second and final part of their discussion to give his perspective on Opportunity Structure Signatures, Examining Crime Prevention Mechanisms, Weak Intervention Backfire Concerns, and much more. The post CrimeScience Episode 64 – Choice, Crime, and Evidence-Based Prevention featuring Dr. John Eck (University of Cincinnati) Part 2 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 this science for loss prevention and asset protection practitioners, as well as other professionals. We would like to thank Bosch for making this episode possible. We use Bosch Camera's onboard intelligent video analytics to quickly locate important recorded incidents or events. Bosch's forensic search saves you time and money by searching through hours or days of video within minutes to find and collect video evidence. Learn more about intelligent video analytics from Bosch in zones one through four of LPRC's zones of influence by visiting Bosch online at BoschSecurity.com. This is the second part of our discussion with John Eck and our host, Dr. Reid Hayes. Can you spend a minute talking a little bit about the opportunity structures and their signatures? a little bit about the opportunity structures and their signatures. That's something that really, really resonated with me a few years back. And then I've leveraged quite extensively.

But just the idea of, okay, in the mind of the offender, in their shoes, if you will, and they're moving through time and place, whether it's opportunistic or they're hunting for something. But what are these structures? What does that mean? And how might they signal something one way or the other to a potential offender? Right. Well, one way of thinking about it is to think, and I don't want to push too hard on this because it can be kind of pejorative if you if you take it uh realistically but uh uh i live in rural maine most of my the time and so there's a lot of wildlife around and i've always been interested in wildlife and uh a lot of the behavior of you know the foxes here and

the deer are i mean pretty much all their baby is structured by where food is located, where water is located, where they can find security. So their patterns are molded by this. And I mean, any hunter would tell you basically they can check game trails and stuff. Animals have these routines. But in some sense, nature provides them with an opportunity structure. So a successful animal will locate and identify recurring food sources, water sources, places of safety, and so forth. And one that's not successful won't identify such things. And that's true of all human beings, too.

I mean, people have figured out routines that actually make themselves successful or not. So offenders, you know, people who have a sort of an inclination to offend, and I use that term loosely, you know, pick up on where it's likely that they can get away with something. And so they will reorganize their routines to fit that. So in some sense, the opportunity structure, when I think of two sides of a mold, right, you've got this sort of a positive and negative sides of the mold. Well, the opportunity structure is one half of the mold and the behavior of the individual is the other side. They fit, maybe not as tight as a perfect mold, but there's a good fit there. So if you know the opportunity structure, that tells you a lot about the rhythm of crime,

the patterning of crime. And if you knew a lot about the patterning of crime, that tells you something about the opportunity structure. So from a criminological point of view, if we know what times crimes are happening, what is being taken, where, at a fairly detailed level, that gives us strong hints as to what that opportunity structure is and what we should be looking for in sort of normal, in sort of normal legitimate behavior that we could tweak to make it more difficult for offenders. So that's basically the idea of an opportunity structure is it just features the environment

the offenders take advantage of. And it's not just the places they commit crimes. So there's, yeah, I can take this thing off a shelf at this store and walk out the door with a little trouble. But there's also this opportunity structure incorporates how they get to the store, where they go afterwards, how they dispose of the goods. All of these things fit into that kind of calculus. into that kind of calculus. So it's, in some sense, it comes down to sort of like,

what is the geography of temptation? You know, where tempting places are and tempting circumstances, you're gonna get more bad behavior. You know, sort of that loosely is what it is, but really it just depends on the specifics of the circumstance. So go back to these drug dealing locations that I studied back in the 90s. One of the things that we identified was that they tended to be smaller apartment buildings. If offenders had, drug dealers had basically set up shop randomly across all apartment buildings,

you'd expect them to be mostly in larger apartment buildings because there'd be more apartments in larger apartment buildings. But they weren't. They were disproportionately going after these small places. And that behavior, that routine that we were seeing in the data suggested that there is an opportunity structure being created by small-time landlords. And it wasn't every small-time landlord. Most of them were actually drug dealing free, but it was skewed in that direction. So what could that be? And it was the notion of, gee, it's more difficult to make profits in these small time operations. And if you have 10 units and one of them is vacant, you've lost 10% of your income stream.

And if you're running a 50 unit apartment complex, one of them is empty, it's 150th, right? So the pressures to accommodate drug dealing were higher for these small time. So that the economic structure of real estate and apartment rentals helped drug dealers decide where it was safest and most lucrative for them to set up. And as we'd expect from one of my favorite theories,

routine activity theory, it's legitimate behaviors, legitimate practices and patterns, schedules, routines, give the shape of crime in time and space. And so the opportunity structure is just an outgrowth of that notion. It's an idea that is best used for very specific circumstances, because when you talk about opportunity structures in general, it falls apart very quickly because the opportunity structure of a big box store is going to be very, very different than a small convenience store or an apartment building or a parking garage or a church.

All of those things will have different opportunity structures. So it's a pretty flexible term, but one that really, to understand it, you need to look up close and personal. That's fantastic. And I scribbled down, too, the rhythm of crime, but the rhythm of the place and the activities, great terminology. Yeah. Last week, there was the first ever online crime conference, which was really fantastic. And there was a paper given by Andrew Newton from the UK advocating the, I think it was 168 hour way of looking at a week.

And so instead of saying, okay, here's what happens every day. And then here's what happens, you know, midnight on a 24-hour clock, he's going to combine those things. And again, it's one of those brilliant, like, duh, I should have known this. You look at all of those hours across a week, and you see these amazing rhythms that, you know, these ebbs and flows of things. So things, yeah, they might be bigger on Saturday, but the Saturday rhythm is just higher. It looks pretty much like the Wednesday rhythm, too. And so one of the things he and I got into a brief discussion about was how to incorporate that at places. Because places have very strong rhythms.

Stores have opening hours and closing hours. And then there's when the employees and owners show up and leave, which is slightly different than the opening and closing hours. There's sales rhythms. All of those things give structure to how everyday life is going to go on. And so you would expect that to also give structure to how the offenders perceive the place and what they can and do take advantage of. Fantastic. And this is just what I was looking for in all these discussions John is for all of us to

to really think and understand at these levels that um you know I like the idea of you know the main the wildlife and and those structures I actually have two cousins that are PhD biologists in California one's birds one's reptiles but we the day, you know, I'm multi-generational from Florida, it's the South and bird hunting, which is quail hunting. It was always a big thing with your bird dogs, but you would have these feeders out. And, and so where, where would you maybe have a rattlesnake? Well, rattlesnakes learn pretty quickly that quail are around the cracked corn and they're, they know they're there at certain times. So if you want to find a rattlesnake or be victimized by one, that's where you're going to probably go. So, but yeah, these things made sense to us. And of course, sort of superficially, or I guess just sort of intuitively for us,

but for my cousins, when they would ride with us, like, well, here's what's going on. And, you know, think about these things, but there's no almost no difference between that and what you're describing yeah it's it's fascinating so i remember right when i first started riding around with cops you know we'd be going down the street and i'd be having a conversation with him asking him questions and all of a sudden the cop would twist his head and maybe change the pace of the car, slow it up, increase the hip. And it's clear he saw something.

And of course, I'd missed it completely. And so I became fascinated by this ability to see things. And then it hit me after many of these things that this is actually no different than it was when I was in middle school and I would be taken off on a field trip in summer on the nature center where we would go on a snake hunt. And I'd be walking through the woods with the counselor and six other kids. And the counselor would say, everyone stop. There's a snake over there.

I'm going, what? Huh? Huh? What? I can see it. But, you know, you get, you start, you get experienced with this. You get trained to see things as a specialist. A hunter sees things in the woods that I don't see.

And anybody involved in loss prevention sees things that anyone else doesn't. doesn't right uh just like an artist you know looks at a uh a set of uh colors or and and tools and they they can envision something that those of us who are not artists can't see um so you know we need to get beyond the gee whiz kind of thing and realize that, you know, there are things going on here that if we actually spent the time really looking carefully just like you know the migration of waterfowl or uh you know the um any other natural pattern uh it's not all that um crazy when you think about it just that we just we just oblivious to it for most of the time no good good stuff and and you probably know a little bit about, but our team, I mean, working with over 60 major retailers and they have hundreds,

most of them thousands of locations. So you can just imagine the, the tempo of what the crime attempts and victimization is going on, that we're trying to help them with theft, with fraud, with violence. And so it's a pretty dizzying array, but our going in is always, we're here first and foremost to safeguard the vulnerable people and places that we're dealing with. Now, how do we work out from that? And so when we look at these treatments, interventions, you know, what we do,

and based on a whole lot of what you've been talking about, these things don't always work very well. And you mentioned this earlier. Well, okay, we tried that. Let's try it differently. We dose differently. You know, what hotspot do we go to? How often? How long? What do we do while we're there? Is it random or planned, but scheduled? But can we talk a minute about, and I really never thought about this, but it definitely seems to apply to say antibiotics, weak interventions that we might try. We don't, they're either not designed well, or we just don't execute them. But your discussions around the backfire concerns from that, if we're going to do it, this is just my takeaway, we need to do it right. So let me go to you, John, any thoughts?

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny you bring this up because, and I get to tell you this little story because I don't want to take credit for this in the least. This idea, the weak intervention backfire, or what's sometimes called hormesis in biology and pest eradication, came from one of my former graduate students, Shannon Linning, who is now at the University, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. on Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. And she'd worked in a biology lab. I think it's an undergraduate, and this is something that had come up. So this is more her idea than mine. And it was just one of those magical moments in teaching where you have this incredibly smart student

who has this insight. And my role really was to sort of help her package it so that we could display it to the rest of the world. But this is Shannon's idea. And the idea is that in, for example, when dealing with pesticides, you might know that a particular chemical when put on crops theoretically will kill the pest. Let's leave aside all these other bad side effects of spraying poisons on things. Let's focus on the technical bits here. focus on the technical bits here. But in some circumstances, there's evidence that just using too little of the pesticide actually makes things worse. So for example, you might have

a particular pest that is preyed upon by spiders. And the spiders are more vulnerable to the pesticide than the bug so you put on a too low a dose because say you're trying to save money the spiders get killed off a few of the bugs get killed off but most of the bugs that are left are not like hey woohoo spider free let's go to town right and so things have been made worse. The, and there's a lot of reasons for, you might get with this color or medic effect. So what Shannon's insight was to say, you know, maybe some of this is going on in crime prevention that we have circumstances where we've actually put too low a dose or the

wrong kind of dose on something. And we've come to the conclusion that things didn't get better or maybe got worse. Where as a point of fact, if we'd done it differently or done it more, we'd have had a better effect. And there's tantalizing bits of evidence out there. And my favorite, because it's relatively simple, is from the Minneapolis Hotspots Patrol experiment. And there was a nice little follow-on study to that, which Chris Kopert, many years ago, looked at how much time officers spent at hotspots. And he came to the conclusion that roughly 12 minutes was the golden time period. Beyond that, it didn't help.

Below that, you didn't get much effect. And I think that's been replicated a couple of times. So there's an interval. You need to do a certain amount to get the impact well shannon went back and looked at chris's data and there was a spike uh in crime for like at like roughly the i believe the two minute mark or something like that um and it's like that's interesting uh why would that take place and uh our conjecture is it's a possible hermetic effect, because if you have a hotspot of crime and the offenders are sort of hanging out there, they see a cop come in and he doesn't spend very much time there, they're pretty certain he's

not going to be back for a while. So they just wait the extra 30 seconds, a minute or two, and the cop is gone. They go back to what they're doing. Whereas if the cop stays 12 minutes, right, now they're acting out of character, right? So the offender doesn't know what the hell is going to happen next because they don't stand around for 12 minutes usually. And that disrupts their crime pattern so that's a sort of a simple example of a hermetic effect where not enough is put in um so uh that that little idea turned out to have major consequences because it really suggests that we need to be much more careful on things like dosage. It's not just say, oh, this works. Yeah, it works, but at a certain level. You have to do a certain amount of it before you're going to get the impact you want.

And perhaps, although we have less information on this, you have to do it exactly this way, or you can't do it this other way, right? Not every possible permutation is going to work equally well. And typically, we have very little information about the details of interventions. Most evaluations don't describe exactly how things went out. I mean, if you pick up an academic article and say, evaluated this intervention, and the cops did something, or the loss prevention people did something, and crime went down. Yay. Could you pick up that article and say, okay, okay, I now have a cookbook. I can say do A, B, C, but not E, F, and G. And I've got a 75 to 90% chance of getting this done. No. Almost none of these evaluations give you enough, give the practitioner enough information about how to do it right. And it's not even clear the researcher

knew how to do it right. They just knew that someone was doing something. It was this complex package of activities the police or the loss prevention people were engaged in, and they distilled it down to like a three-word line, right? We're doing community-oriented policing, or we're doing whatever, right? But what does that mean on the ground? Harder to tell. So we need to do a lot better at describing what our interventions are in enough detail that a practitioner could actually follow equivalent of a recipe and say if I follow this recipe I'm very likely to get the kind of cake that I set out to get. Instead what we have is you know get some floury stuff and throw some liquid into it and put it in the oven and you'll

get something good. That's the extent of our recommendations now. So, yeah, the whole idea of hormesis really sort of says to us, we need to be better at describing things and not just describing the details about why it works, but how it works, the process by which these activities translate into less crime. And we're not very good at that. Yeah, and you see it's probably nothing more relevant right now is now there's a pretty focused look at policing and a way that should be evidence-based.

And going back to what you're discussing, okay, yes, but I think we need to provide not just better evidence, but very detailed usage information, dosing information. Because if you want to help out the practitioner, you've got to give them something that's not just made it in a journal, but that is absolutely, it's good evidence, but it's also got the logic model has been articulated. And maybe it's even given them some dials that they can turn, as you say, to spin it up and then to bracket it in for the exact situation they're dealing with. Yeah, most evaluations basically would fall into the category of proof of concept. You know, if something vaguely like this, we have the ability in some circumstances to get this proof of concept. If we do something vaguely like this, we have the ability in some circumstances to get this kind of outcome. And that's an important thing to know.

But there's a big step between demonstrating that this concept can produce results and saying, if you do these steps, you will consistently get these results. And that's, you know, we have not built up that body of knowledge. And one of the things that has gotten a fair amount of attention over the last decade, but is still not really well documented, is what we call the mechanism. And that's the literally drawing a logic diagram to say we intervened here, we did this specific activity. And this meant that it led to a cascade of very specific other activities, which at the end of that cascade results in less crime.

That connection between our intervention and the crime is very vague. And by leaving it vague, we don't know whether we've underdosed it, overdosed it, left something out. You know, we just don't know. Yeah, we need to draw up the, overusing these analogies, the spike protein. That's our aiming point. And then, yeah, here's the mechanism of action to affect that and its interaction or entry into the cell. And okay, we're gonna yeah yeah but and

that contrast between what we do in medicine what we're doing crime prevention is i think pretty dramatic because any developing a new drug now you know you basically have to know a lot about the the not just the biology but the physics and the chemistry that's happening in cells and around cells, and then move that up several layers to how that works in a human being. And then it goes even further. There are discussions like, can these new virus treatments be delivered to people in rural areas, right? So there's a whole process, which is logistics, which, I mean, we don't think about those kinds of scale issues in crime prevention,

but in prevention of diseases, you know, the medical process, you know, you know, the, the, the medical process. I mean, we may have to know that a lot of detail before a drug is even approved. So it shows how far we have to go. Good stuff, John. And I very much appreciate that. I think, you know, the last thing is, is there anything you hear these reporters, the good ones anyway, ask, is there anything I did not ask you that I should have asked you around this, knowing a little bit about what we're trying to accomplish out there and what you do that might be helpful?

No, actually, you've looked at quite a bit of it. I would just have to add that going from the very specific, which we just talked about, to more general, one of the things that I've discovered is that a lot of the way we think about the world and the world of crime influences how we think about these very specific things. So, for example, you go to college and you take a stats class and you immediately talk about a normal distribution, right? And so there's this vague notion out there that normal distributions are quite normal. And so we tend to want to impose normal distributions in everything when point of fact, normal distributions are not. And a lot of the insights that we get are really just down to having a very simple understanding of the world that is actually more accurate,

that a few cause more, turns out to be an incredibly powerful thought, that it shows up so often, that when confronted with a new situation, you should always ask yourself, am I looking at the tiny fraction of all these things that cause most of the problem, right? Is there a hidden world of things that go well that I'm not aware of, right? And that reveals a whole different pattern of thinking because imagine you have a a large corporation with thousands of outlets or hundreds of outlets and you're getting these reports of of high theft or product loss right

well the question is, it's going to be concentrated. You know that. So why is it at these places? This notion that it's a problem that happens everywhere is just not true. It's going to be in a few. Why there?

And it also goes into how we deal with rulemaking and regulation both inside companies and from the government. So if we know that basically a few apartment complexes are going to have a lot of crime, but most are going to be reasonably crime-free, we would want some kind of regulation on apartment buildings which would take into account this skewness, this concentration, so that not every landlord gets the same treatment. But the typical regulatory process, both within corporations and by government on businesses tends to be more uniform than it should be. It needs to really be much more nuanced to tightly focus resources.

So that's where I think a lot more work should be done is to find out how to focus effort inside organizations and outside of them. That was good stuff. Really, I appreciate that. And so I want to wish you well, encourage you to continue your good works and all the mentoring you're doing as well. Your students out there are also making a real difference. They're great people to work with. Let me tell you. Absolutely. So stay safe, John.

Anytime. Love to maybe revisit again. And I look forward to working with you at some point, at least meeting up in the future. So have a good one. Enjoy Maine. Meeting up can happen. That's right. When it's safe to do so all right we'll take care out there thank you very much bye thanks john and to everybody else out there thank you for listening again to another episode of crime science the

podcast today with dr with dr act and we will back in touch signing off from gainesville thanks for listening to the crime science Podcast presented by the Laws 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.