JOUNEY TO CRIME

Abstract

Crimes and offenders follow spatio-temporal patterns of their distributions and action space. There are studies that point out that criminals tend to commit crimes more often in places close to their own home in a distance decaying pattern. However, the understanding of criminal behavior requires the analysis of individual cases, in order not to incur the inference from aggregate data, which is commonly called ecological fallacy. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze at an individual level, from a longitudinal perspective, events perpetrated by serial criminals, analyzing the distances in which these individuals commit their crimes, taking as a parameter the beginning of your journey as the home address. The methodology included analysis of data contained in bulletins of police occurrence. A total of 114 serial criminals were investigated, authors of 1259 occurrences from 2011 to 2013 in Belo Horizonte. The results pointed out that it is not possible to predict the criminal behavior of the individual based on the data analyzed together, since the journey to crime, analyzing the package of criminal events, there is a decrease in distance in the commission of crimes, both for serial criminals, and non-serial criminals. Nevertheless, this verification is only valid for the data set, which was not verified in the analysis of the frequency of events in relation to the residence of the offender at the individual level.