International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 57

International Journal on Criminology
When crime rates go up, marginal benefits of protective measures increase and at
a certain point outweigh marginal costs. Potential victims will be ready to invest in
security. When levels of crime prevention rise, the costs/benefits ratio of offending
becomes less favorable. At some point offending starts to become economically
unattractive. At this juncture crime rates will start to fall (Van Dijk 2010, 2).
Citing the work of Graham Farrell, Nick Tilley, Andromachi Tseloni, and Jen Mailley
on the “security hypothesis” in terms of vehicle thefts and a study by Ben Vollaard and Jan van
Ours on burglaries, Van Dijk notes that:
Several studies have demonstrated that the fall in car thefts has indeed been largely
caused by in-built security (e.g. Farrell et al. 2008). In a recent study, Ben Vollaard
and Van Ours (2010) of Tilburg University assessed the effects of legislation that
made state-of-the-art household security mandatory in houses built after 1999 in
The Netherlands. He shows that burglary victimization rates in newly built houses
were a quarter lower than in the older ones. There were no signs of displacement to
other neighborhoods in the city. The implementation of the new legislation alone
has prevented the commission of 10,000 burglaries (… from 2001 to 2009) (Van
Dijk 2010, 2).
The change in the trend of domestic burglary with forced entry that occurred in 2008,
and the sharp increases that followed in metropolitan France, Belgium, and Germany after
a period of several years of distinct decline, appear to weaken the hypothesis according to
which Jan Van Dijk’s process of “responsive securitization” “may well have been the main
driver of the crime falls.”
Analysis of the characteristics of the increase of burglary in Belgium and metropolitan
France offers the possibility of envisaging a “hypothesis of professionalization” that does
not necessarily call into question the origin of the previous drop, especially because it takes
inspiration from the theories mentioned, the “crime opportunity theory” and the “routine
activity theory,” and also from the theory of rational choice.
Motivated by the lesser penal risk of nonviolent burglary and by the rising price
of gold, the arrival of new actors working within the context of organized crime may have
changed the balance of the crime market. Existing protective measures would no longer be
enough to protect homes due to the use of more effective methods of operation.
The pertinence of responsive securitization at a given moment does not exclude that
the behavior of actors can subsequently change. In the equation determining the level of
victimization rates, the impact of victim response can be reduced by perpetrators adapting
their techniques.
It is therefore possible that we are now engaged in a new cycle of responsive
securitization that responds to a much more elaborate form of burglary with forced entry than
before. The existence of an annual victimization surveys in France should now allow multiple
empirical verifications related to this subject.
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