International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 34

What recent property crime trends in Western Europe tells us about the crime drop
In his 2012 speech, Van Dijk described the dynamic of “responsive securitization”
as follows:
As long as the benefits of crime outweigh the costs of offending, the pool of
offenders expands and crime rates go up. Resulting rises in the losses of victims
to crime, makes investments in self-protection by potential victims more
profitable. Pools of well protected potential victims expand, shrinking criminal
opportunities of crime. When the scale of such responsive securitization
reaches a critical level, potential new offenders are discouraged from entering
the criminal market. And crime rates start to fall.
He specifies that this type of “rational choice” (rational choice theory) is “also
related to the theory of situational crime prevention, developed by Marcus Felson, Ron
Clarke, and Pat Mayhew.”
Van Dijk notes that the first references in this domain were published in the 1970s,
and in particular in 1979 for the theory of routine activities:
In 1975, British criminologists Ron Clarke, Pat Mayhew and Mike Hough, in
house researchers of the Home Office, published a seminal report called Crime
as Opportunity (Clarke et al. 1975). Crime, they argued, is driven by the extent
of viable opportunities of crime in the here and now. Some years later, in 1979,
Marcus Felson ascribed the boom in volume crime in the USA to the increased
availability of suitable targets for theft (such as cars and durable consumer
goods) and a dispersal of activities away from family and home, eroding natural
guardianship. In this equally seminal publication the term routine activity
theory was first coined (Van Dijk 2012, 5).
He explains how “the empirical evidence presented by Felson for the causal
relationships between routine activities and crime was based on a secondary analysis of
data from the National Crime Victimization Surveys of the USA.” In 1979, it had already
existed for a half-dozen years.
In the United Kingdom, still according to Van Dijk, “the three authors of Crime as
Opportunity, … , would soon become the main protagonists of the world famous British
Crime Surveys.”
In 2004, when Mayhew and Hough looked back at the beginning of the British
Crime Survey (BCS) in the early 1980s, they explained that “an important priority was to
shed more light on which portions of the population were at risk and why” (Hough and
Mayhew 2004, 273). 3
At the time, they took inspiration from work that “was developing in terms of
situational prevention (Clarke and Mayhew 1980) and the routine activities theory (Cohen
and Felson 1979)” (Hough and Mayhew 2004, 274). As they recognized, “retrospectively,
it was probably one of the most useful elements in the surveys, providing not only
3
Translator’s note: Quotations in this paragraph have been back-translated from the French-language version
of this article.
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