The Influence of Environmental Disruption on Offender-Target Interactions and Criminal Activity in Emergency Scenarios

Both vulnerability to crime victimization and exposure to the criminal justice system are inherently spatial phenomena, with varying, and often disparate, implications among people and across places. The geography of crime is best understood as a complex adaptive system in which criminogenic spaces emerge from the spatial interactions of law enforcement and individual potential offenders under heterogenous situational characteristics. Disturbances to that system can influence the spatial availability and accessibility to crime opportunity by both offenders and law enforcement, which in turn can produce new and alternative patterns of criminal activity. This research brings together theory and methods from geography, criminology, and operations research to effectively model and measure the impact of extreme events on crime and victimization. Grounded in routine activity theory this research implements an innovative and potentially transformative coupled spatial optimization and agent-based modeling approach representing motivated offenders, potential targets, and the allocation of protective resources both routinely and during emergency situations. This modeling system simulated offender movement and related patterns of criminal activity through the preparation, response, and recovery phases across a range of hazard and disaster scenarios.The integrated modeling system simulated criminal activity across four scenarios: Baseline, hurricane, tornado, and a sudden severe thunderstorm. The models developed here performed as designed and as expected. The results of each baseline showed crime was clustered at the global scale and concentrated among a small number of offenders and targets. Crime locations were near consistently at high-value, high-risk targets with a chronic offender present. Changes in existing patterns during the three hazard scenarios were also a function of the existing target attributes. More simply, crime locations were determined using a specific set of attributes; disrupting the number of target and offender locations changed the attributes available to calculate the decision model. The results highlight how hazards and disasters may influence the evolution of new or alternative criminogenic spaces representing adaptive response to both changing environmental conditions and to dynamic patterns of guardianship in emergency situations.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Alabama Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Price, Ashleigh Nicole

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Curtin, Kevin M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Magliocca, Nicholas R.
• Senkbeil, Jason C.
• Summers, Diana L.
• Wang, Fahui

• agent-based modeling
• crime geography
• hazards
• location science
• spatial optimization

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US, English

Dc Identifier Other

1190447

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ir.ua.edu:123456789/17598