Question

discuss how Environmental Criminology Theories can be used to enhance law enforcement methods of linking crimes and understanding the spatial behavioral pattern of offenders.

Answer 1

Introduction

Environmental criminology is a family of theories that share a common interest in

criminal events and the immediate circumstances in which they occur.‘environmental criminology argues that

criminal events must be understood as confluences of offenders, victims or criminal

targets, and laws in specific settings at particular times and places’. Environmental

criminologists look for crime patterns and seek to explain them in terms of

environmental influences. From these explanations they derive rules that enable

predictions to be made about emerging crime problems, and that ultimately inform the

development of strategies that might be employed to prevent crime.

Crime analysis is an investigative tool, defined as ‘the set of systematic,

analytical processes that provide timely, pertinent information about crime patterns

and crime-trend correlations’ .It uses crime data and police reports

to study crime problems, including the characteristics of crime scenes, offenders and

victims. Crime patterns are analysed in terms of their socio-demographic, temporal

and spatial qualities, and may be represented visually using graphs, tables and maps.

Using these findings, crime analysts provide tactical advice to police on criminal

investigations, deployment of resources, planning, evaluation, and crime prevention.

Where the job of the crime analyst is to describe crime patterns, the job of the

environmental criminologist is to understand them. These two tasks are highly

interdependent and each informs the other. On the one hand, crime analysts provide

the facts that are the focus of environmental criminology and which are needed by

environmental criminologists to develop and test their theories. On the other hand,

environmental criminology is increasingly used by crime analysts to guide them in the

questions they ask of crime data and in the interpretations that they place on their

findings. Together, the tasks of describing and understanding crime patterns comprise

the environmental perspective on crime.

The concerns of the environmental perspective contrast sharply with those of

most other criminological approaches. Traditional criminological theories are

concerned with criminality. They seek to explain how biological factors,

developmental experiences and/or social forces create the criminal offender. In this,

they take an historical perspective, focussing on the distant causes of crime. The

occurrence of crime is understood largely as an expression of the offender’s acquired

deviance, which may be a function of events that occurred many years beforehand.

Once the criminal has been created, crime is seen as more or less inevitable: the exact

location and timing of the criminal act is of little interest. The prevention of crime is

viewed in terms of changing offenders’ fundamental criminality through enriching

their childhoods, removing social disadvantage, and – once they have offended –

providing them with rehabilitation programmes.