International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 32

International Journal on Criminology - Spring 2015, Volume 3, Number 1
What recent property crime trends in Western Europe
tells us about the crime drop
Cyril Rizk A & Inès Bettaïeb B
In the early 2000s, the debate surrounding the “crime drop” focused primarily
on the reasons for the drop in homicide rates in the United States. It expanded
later to include drops in other crimes—violence in a wider sense and property
crime—and other countries, such as Canada, England, and Wales. A series
of interpretations of the sharp drop in vehicle theft and burglaries inspired by
the theory of criminal opportunity merits particular attention because the hypotheses
on which these interpretations are based can be compared with the
results of crime victimization surveys such as the British Crime Survey (BCS)
and International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS). The hypothesis outlined by
the Dutch researcher Jan Van Dijk, “responsive securitization,” seems, however,
to be undercut by the change in trends that have been observed since 2008 in
terms of domestic burglary with forced entry in metropolitan France, as well
as in Belgium and Germany. The first reporting on the data available on the
characteristics of burglaries with forced entry in France and Belgium leads us
to think that their recent rise is the result of the increased involvement of organized
crime. This “hypothesis of professionalization” does not necessarily contradict
the existence of a prior cycle of response in the form of improving security
equipment, especially as it should elicit its own “responsive securitization.”
Keywords: Crime drop, Responsive securitization, Opportunity theory, Security
hypothesis, Rational choice, Trends in crime, Hypothesis of professionalization.
Introduction
The statistical data available for metropolitan France as a whole allow us to
establish that in 2009, after several years of decline, the number of home
burglaries with forced entry began to increase, while the number of vehicle
thefts continued to decline.
Until 2008, the reduction in the frequency of these two types of thefts could be
understood within the framework of international research on the “crime drop.” This
expression 1 comes from the title of a collection published in 2000, The Crime Drop in
America, by Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
A
Head of Statistics at the Observatoire National de la Délinquance et des Réponses Pénales (ONDRP)
B
Statistics Research Director at the ONDRP
1
Different phenomena of crime decrease have been described as a “crime drop.” As a result, there is
no single definition of it. It depends on the infractions that are taken into account, the places, and the
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