Crime Linked to Ease of Opportunity
After having my car broken into and a few personal affects stolen over the weekend, I wondered: What makes a thief? Delving into online research, I learned that it wasn’t really personal upbringing, lack of morals, or where a person grew up that determined if a person participated in the world of crime. According to Ronald V. Clark, instead, it is a person with criminal tendencies who sees opportunities for crime that commits the deed. In the case of my car, parked in a dark parking lot in Cayuga Heights, it would have been easy for someone to break in, poke around without being noticed and take whatever was of value. So in a sense, it was my fault that I was robbed.
In the article “Opportunity makes the thief. Really? And so what?” Ronald V. Clark makes the statement that “crime is the result of an interaction between a motivated offender and a criminal opportunity.” As a reader unfamiliar with this claim, I was surprised to learn that my getting robbed probably had little to do with the person who robbed me, and more to do with the fact that breaking into my car was easy. In the article, the author outlines seven points about why crime occurs:
1. Criminally-disposed people will commit more crimes if they encounter more criminal opportunities.
2. Regularly encountering such opportunities can lead these people to seek even more opportunities.
3. At the point of deciding to commit a crime, opportunity plays a more important role that dispositions.
4. The existence of easy opportunities for crime enables some people to lead a life of crime.
5. People without pre-existing dispositions can be drawn into criminal behaviour by a proliferation of criminal opportunities, and generally law-abiding people can be drawn into committing specific forms of crime if they regularly encounter easy opportunities for these crimes, especially in their occupations.
6. The more opportunities for crime that exist, the more crime there will be.
7. Reducing opportunities for specific forms of crime will reduce the overall amount of crime. (Clark “Opportunity Makes the Thief”)
While these points may seem like the work of common sense, Clark and his team performed a lot of research to achieve these results. This means that people, like me, can work to reduce the risk of being victims of crime in the future.
Graph theory can be applied to this subject to see the effects of opportunity on crime. Make nodes people with tendencies to commit crime, and the crimes themselves, and make edges the opportunities to commit the crimes. Edges can also be strong or weak as discussed in class. Easy opportunities for crime increase the opportunity that person will commit the crime. Difficult opportunities for crime dissuade the person from completing the criminal activity. So in my case, there are a few things that I could do to decrease the chance that my car will be broken into in the future. All of the options must decrease the ease at which a crime can be completed. In one instance, I could move to a well-lit, active neighborhood – however this isn’t an option with an apartment lease. Another thing that I could do is request police patrols of Cayuga Heights at night. Both options weaken the strength of the ties by increasing the chance the robber will be caught committing the crime. However, the second option makes all of Cayuga Heights a less attractive neighborhood for crime and is a good option for my situation. Knowing what I know now, that opportunity links people to crime, I can hopefully reduce my chance of becoming a target of crime in the future.
http://www.crimesciencejournal.com/content/1/1/3