International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 50

What recent property crime trends in Western Europe tells us about the crime drop
thefts and attempted thefts of residences reported by households during the annual Cadre
de vie et sécurité surveys between 2006 and 2011 means that during this period, the drop
and then the rise measured by police crime statistics very likely indicates the trend in the
crime itself and not only in the number of cases actually recorded.
This hypothesis can be extended to Belgium and Germany, which, as we have
seen, have displayed variations similar to those in France in terms of cambriolages dans les
habitations au sens strict (Belgium) and Wohnungseinbruchdiebstahl (Germany) recorded
by the police.
At the same time, the continued decrease in motor-vehicle-related thefts in
metropolitan France has also been established in the framework of a multisource analysis
of trends (Graphs 4a and 4b):
The estimated number of motor-vehicle-related thefts and attempted thefts
reported by households declined steadily over the period studied, going from
6.9 per hundred households in 2006 to 4.6 per hundred households in 2011,
or, in estimated numbers, from more than 1.8 million thefts and attempted
thefts to fewer than 1.3 million. It therefore decreased by more than 30% in five
years. The variation between 2006 and 2011 of the number of reported cases of
motor-vehicle-related thefts recorded by the police and gendarmes provided by
État 4001 presents a great number of similarities with the estimated numbers
taken from the Cadre de vie et sécurité surveys. In 2011, 551,844 cases of motorvehicle-related
thefts were reported. This number dropped by 25.8% over five
years (−191,852 reported cases). In 2006, 743,696 motor-vehicle-related thefts
were recorded by the police and gendarmes (Rapport annuel, ONDRP 2012).
It can be deduced that from 2006 to 2008, in metropolitan France, but also by
comparison and extension in Belgium and Germany, motor-vehicle-related thefts and
domestic burglary with forced entry underwent a major drop—a “crime drop.”
After 2008, the trend continued for motor-vehicle-related thefts but not for
domestic burglary with forced entry. The latter began an upward trend in 2009 and the
increase has continued to pick up pace over the subsequent years.
How can we explain the disconnect since 2008 between two types of crimes that
were described as being part of the shared crime drop in previous years using the same
hypothesis, the “security hypothesis,” within the theoretical framework of “responsive
securitization?”
The Hypothesis of Professionalization
According to the responsive securitization model based on the theory of
opportunities, “Rates of victimization are determined by interactions between the rational
choices of offenders and victims on a market of crime. As long as the benefits of crime
outweigh the costs of offending, the pool of offenders expands and crime rates go up”
(Van Dijk 2012, 19).
In its July 2013 communiqué, the Belgian Federal Police proposed several factors
to explain the rise in domestic burglaries with forced entry: “the growing influence of the
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