Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-019-09406-z

ORIGINAL PAPER

Crime Feeds on Legal Activities: Daily Mobility Flows Help

to Explain Thieves’ Target Location Choices

Guangwen Song1 · Wim Bernasco2,3 · Lin Liu1,4 · Luzi Xiao1 · Suhong Zhou5 ·
Weiwei Liao5

Published online: 13 February 2019

© The Author(s) 2019

Abstract
Objective According to routine activity theory and crime pattern theory, crime feeds on
the legal routine activities of offenders and unguarded victims. Based on this assumption,
the present study investigates whether daily mobility flows of the urban population help
predict where individual thieves commit crimes.
Methods Geocoded tracks of mobile phones are used to estimate the intensity of popula-
tion mobility between pairs of 1616 communities in a large city in China. Using data on
3436 police-recorded thefts from the person, we apply discrete choice models to assess
whether mobility flows help explain where offenders go to perpetrate crime.
Results Accounting for the presence of crime generators and distance to the offender’s
home location, we find that the stronger a community is connected by population flows to
where the offender lives, the larger its probability of being targeted.
Conclusions The mobility flow measure is a useful addition to the estimated effects of dis-
tance and crime generators. It predicts the locations of thefts much better than the presence
of crime generators does. However, it does not replace the role of distance, suggesting that
offenders are more spatially restricted than others, or that even within their activity spaces
they prefer to offend near their homes.

Keywords Crime location choice · Theft from the person · Mobility · Routine activities ·
China

* Lin Liu
[email protected]
1
Center of Geo‑Informatics for Public Security, School of Geographical Sciences, Guangzhou
University, Guangzhou, China
2
Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), P.O.
Box 713041008BH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3
Department of Spatial Economics, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
4
Department of Geography, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
5
Center of Integrated Geographic Information Analysis, School of Geography and Planning, Sun
Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

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832 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

Introduction

Opportunity theories of crime assume that most crimes take place while the victims and
the offenders are involved in non-criminal routine activities. Even crimes that are premed-
itated and that are not perpetrated during the offenders’ routine activities, are neverthe-
less supposed to be informed by what offenders heard, saw, read or picked up otherwise
during non-criminal daily routines. In their introduction of routine activity theory, Cohen
and Felson (1979) summarize this position by stating that “illegal activities feed upon the
legal activities of everyday life” (p. 588). In outlining crime pattern theory, Brantingham
and Brantingham (2008) take the same position by stating that “what shapes non-criminal
activities helps shape criminal activities” (p. 79). The present study aims to test this key
assumption of opportunity theories. To do so, it puts front stage the daily mobility flows
of the urban population as measured by the tracks of mobile phones and assesses whether
these mobility flows help predict where individual thieves commit crimes. The key ques-
tion is thus one that precisely describes the criminal location choice approach (Bernasco
and Nieuwbeerta 2005): Given the home location of an offender motivated to commit a
crime and given the locations of all potential targets, can we understand and predict where
the offender commits the offense? Whereas prior crime location studies have included only
the home-target distance (and occasionally also measures of physical and social barriers) to
explain crime location choice (Ruiter 2017), the present study explores whether the expla-
nation can be improved by considering the movement patterns of the general population as
a ‘spatial template’ for the journey to crime.

Background

In trying to understand and predict where individual offenders go to commit crimes, it is

important to consider their journey to crime, which links their home location to where
they commit crime (Rengert 2004). Two empirical observations seem undisputed. The
first observation is that the frequency of crime displays distance decay: it decreases with
the distance from the offender’s home (Rossmo 2000). The median distance between
the offender’s home and the crime location is no more than a mile, with some variation
observed across crime types and offender categories (Townsley and Sidebottom 2010).
Research in human geography has demonstrated that distance decay also characterizes non-
criminal routine activities like working, visiting friends or shopping. The distribution of
daily human travel distances, including presumably those of offenders, follows a power law
function: Most of our trips are over short distances whereas occasionally we take longer
trips (Gonzalez et al. 2008). Thus, legal and illegal trips both display a distance decay pat-
tern. Although distance from home is not an explicit element of opportunity theories, its
empirical relevance is evident.
The second undisputed observation about crime locations is that crime is geographi-
cally concentrated at and around crime generators, micro-places where many people
converge on a regular basis to pursue similar or complementary activities (Brantingham
and Brantingham 1995). Crime generators include transit stations, shopping centers,
schools, sports venues, entertainment areas and other types of facilities. Crime genera-
tors produce crime for two reasons. First, because they are popular destinations for many
legal activities, they are known to a large proportion of the population, including poten-
tial offenders. They are an element of their activity space. Second, these micro-places

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 833

often provide specific opportunities for crime, especially when they are being visited
by large crowds of people. For example, shops provide opportunities for shoplifters,
distracted passengers at subway stations are easy targets for pickpockets, and intoxi-
cated patrons leaving bars are vulnerable for robbery (Bernasco and Block 2011). In
sum, crime generators produce crime because they are widely known and because they
provide abundant opportunities. Empirical evidence thus demonstrates that offenders
generally commit crimes around busy places located within at most a few miles from
their homes, depending on the crime type, the size of the city and the convenience of
available transportation.
These two observations on distance decay and crime generators, however, do not deter-
mine with much precision where individual offenders perpetrate their crimes. The area
within one mile of an offender’s home already covers 3.14 square miles. The area within
two miles covers no less than 12.57 square miles. Distance does not tell us in which direc-
tion offenders prefer to go. Moreover, most urban landscapes contain a multitude of busy
places within a few miles from anywhere.
Therefore, understanding where offenders commit crimes requires more than the two
‘stylized facts’ about distance decay and crime generators. As emphasized in the opening
lines of this article, opportunity theories of crime assert that most crimes are perpetrated
during, or are informed by, routine activities pursued without explicit criminal intentions.
Thus, to better understand where offenders commit crimes, we need measures to inform us
about their whereabouts during their legal daily routine activities.
Unfortunately, systematic information about the places that offenders visit during non-
criminal daily routines is not easily available. Only two small-scale studies have addressed
the daily mobility of offenders. Rossmo et al. (2012) used data of an electronic monitor-
ing system that tracked continuously in real-time the whereabouts of parolees and offend-
ers on bail under community supervision. Griffiths et al. (2017) used mobile phone data
records of terrorists to track their visits to different locations and to examine their visiting
frequency distributions in the months preceding the attack they were involved in.
Fortunately, however, the mobility patterns of the general population provide a template
for the daily mobility of offenders, and as a direct consequence for their journeys-to-crime
(Boivin and D’Elia 2017). The mobility patterns of the population could thus help pre-
dict where offenders commit crimes, one of the main aims of this study. We measure the
whereabouts of a large fraction of the population of a huge city in China by geo-tracking
their mobile phones during a full day. This allows us to measure daily mobility flows of the
general population as a proxy measure of the daily mobility of the offender population, and
to include this measure as a covariate in a model of crime location choice, together with
distance and the presence of crime generators.
Research on crime and law enforcement in China receives increasing scholarly attention
internationally. The cultural distance between China and western industrialized countries
presents an excellent opportunity to test whether theories developed in western industrial-
ized countries can be generalized to other contexts, in particular China. This opportunity
also applies to environmental criminology, because its main theoretical frameworks—
routine activity theory and crime pattern theory—have been developed and tested almost
exclusively in a western context. A recent exception is a study by Long et al. (2018), who
demonstrated that urban street robbers in China tend to return to locations of their prior
offences to commit subsequent robberies, confirming prior findings from the United King-
dom and The Netherlands. Another exception is a study showing that Chinese burglars who
live in communities with a higher average rent, a denser road network and a higher percent-
age of local residents, commit burglaries at shorter distances from their homes (Xiao et al.

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834 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

2018). However, Chinese studies in environmental criminology are still rare, and one of the
contributions of the present paper is to add to this developing literature.
In the present paper, we focus exclusively on ‘theft from the person’ or TFP, a non-vio-
lent property offense committed in public or semi-public places, excluding burglaries and
thefts from vehicles. Although simple theft is a common crime, it has mostly been ignored
in the crime location choice literature.

Research Question

In sum, the main research question of the present study is whether daily mobility flows
of the general population, as measured by tracked mobile phone data, help us explain and
predict where individual offenders commit thefts from the person. If the answer is positive,
an additional question is whether the inclusion of mobility flows adds to the effects of the
distance and crime generators, or rather replaces them. In other words, we are interested
in the extent to which the effects of mobility flows substitute or complement the effects of
distance and of crime generators.
Our findings not only add to the testing and development of opportunity theories, they
also contribute to a growing body of research that aims to test in other cultures and on
other continents crime theories that have been developed in the USA, Europe and Aus-
tralia. With its high pace of urbanization and economic, cultural and social change, China
seems like an excellent context to test and further develop opportunity theories of crime.

Theory and Prior Findings

The present section will provide a brief overview of the role of distance decay, awareness
space and crime generators in the literature on crime location choice. It will subsequently
address the potential role of the daily mobility of the urban population in modeling and
understanding where offenders commit thefts from the person.

Crime Location Choice

Crime location choice refers to an offender’s choice of where to perpetrate a crime (two
recent reviews are Bernasco and Ruiter 2014; Ruiter 2017). The discrete spatial choice
model was introduced by Bernasco and Nieuwbeerta (2005) as a method to analyze
crime location choices using individual-level offender data. The model is rooted in a for-
mal theory of discrete choice known as random utility maximization in micro-economics
that is consistent with rational choice as applied to offending criminology (Bernasco et al.
2017b; Cornish and Clarke 1986). The theory asserts that offenders choose crime locations
rationally, selecting those locations that maximize their expected rewards and minimize
their expected costs and risks. For example, residential burglars would be expected to tar-
get accessible areas that are affluent and where formal and informal guardianship is low
(Bernasco and Nieuwbeerta 2005), and street robbers would by hypothesized to seek select
crime locations nearby their own homes where they are likely to encounter vulnerable vic-
tims who carry cash or other valuables (Bernasco et al. 2013). These and other factors
assumed to affect crime location choice will be discussed below, in sections “Distance and
Awareness Space” to “Mobility Flows”, with a special focus of offenders committing theft
from the person.

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 835

Distance and Awareness Space

Of all factors that affect crime location choices, distance is by far the most influential. All
sixteen crime location choice studies reviewed by Ruiter (2017) included a strong and sig-
nificant negative effect of distance on crime. The theoretical meaning of distance is disput-
able, as it could be a merely proxy measure for other concepts, such as the cost of travel.
In support of the argument that the time and money costs of travel are more funda-
mental factors than distance, some studies have demonstrated the crime-reducing effects
of physical barriers other than distance. Clare et al. (2009) studied the role of barriers and
connectors on destinations chosen by Australian burglars and found them to have a strong
influence on offenders’ decisions on where to commit burglaries. Peeters and Elffers (2010)
assessed the extent to which highways, railroads, parks and canals reduce the number of
crime trips across these physical barriers, but found only a small effect. Townsley et al.
(2015) demonstrated that for adult offenders, but not for minor offenders, the accessibility
of a target via the street network increased its likelihood of becoming a target of theft from
a vehicle.
Distance might also be considered a proxy measure of the offenders’ awareness space.
Because all human mobility, both legal and illegal, displays distance decay, their routine
activities help shape their awareness space (Brantingham and Brantingham 2008). Offend-
ers are generally more familiar with places nearby their residence than with more distant
places. As a consequence, they must be more knowledgeable of criminal opportunities in
nearby places than in distant places. Indeed, some location choice research has suggested
that offenders are much more likely to offend within their own awareness space than else-
where. Arguing that for various reasons offenders might still be familiar with their former
areas of residence, it has been demonstrated that they are more likely to offend near their
former homes than elsewhere (Bernasco and Kooistra 2010; Lammers et al. 2015; Menting
et al. 2016). It has also been established that they are more likely to offend near the homes
of family members (Menting et al. 2016).
Offenders may also be familiar with places of prior criminal experiences. They have
a tendency to return to places where they previously committed crimes (Bernasco et al.
2015; Lammers et al. 2015), a finding congruent with previous explanations of repeat vic-
timization and near repeat victimization based on victimization data only (Johnson et al.
2007; Townsley et al. 2003).
Establishing a reduced burglary risk in properties along cul-de-sacs, Johnson and Bow-
ers (2010) suggested that their reduced permeability might make cul-the-sacs unfamiliar
places for non-residents, including most potential motivated offenders. Frith et al. (2017)
use the physical layout of the street network to generate alternative measures of offender
spatial awareness, finding the reduced accessibility in the street network reduces the likeli-
hood of street segments being targeted.
In sum, prior research has empirically demonstrated that offenders prefer nearby loca-
tions and locations that are part of their awareness space, and thus both proximity and spa-
tial awareness are important criteria in offenders’ location choices.

Crime Generators

Crime generators and crime attractors are concepts in crime pattern theory that poten-
tially play an important role in crime location choices. They are facilities that have

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836 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

elevated levels of crime because they bring together crowds either continuously or at
certain moments during the day or the week (Brantingham and Brantingham 1995;
Kinney et al. 2008). Crime generators are places and facilities where all kinds of peo-
ple go to perform legal daily activities. Crime attractors have been defined as places
and facilities that have a reputation of providing opportunities for crime, which makes
them particularly attractive to motivated offenders (and unattractive to some potential
victims) (Brantingham and Brantingham 1995). Because crime attractors share many
features with crime generators, and because the reputational element in their definition
may be difficult to evaluate objectively, especially in the context of a non-western cul-
ture, in this paper we will subsume crime attractors under the more general label of
crime generators.
Although it may be impossible to enumerate all types of facilities that can operate as
crime generators, some stand out as being particularly attractive for some types of crime,
and they will be discussed in the present section. We describe elements common to certain
classes of facility, although even amongst the same class (e.g. bars) there exists consider-
able heterogeneity making some of them risky places but others not (Eck et al. 2007).
High schools have been associated with elevated crime rates in part because of the
assumption that the students are more likely than people of younger or older ages to be
involved in crime as offenders or victims. A concentration of adolescents around high
schools would possibly generate a concentration of crime before and after school hours
(Roncek and Faggiani 1985; Roncek and LoBosco 1983). Near elementary schools, oppor-
tunities for TFP are abundant when it is crowded because parents, grandparents and other
caretakers drop off the children in the morning, and also when they pick them up later in
the afternoon.
Research on street robbery has demonstrated that proximity to small scale businesses,
including grocery stores, corner stores, gas stations, barber shops and fast-food restau-
rants, increases the risk of street robbery (Bernasco and Block 2011; Bernasco et al. 2017a;
Haberman and Ratcliffe 2015). To the extent that these are the types of businesses where
cash payments are more common than non-cash payment modes, customers may be likely
to carry cash. Because street robbery and TFP are similar offenses in terms of location
(public space) and preferred items to steal (concealable, removable, available, valuable,
enjoyable and disposable, see Clarke 1999; Wellsmith and Burrell 2005), these businesses
might also function as crime generators for TFP. For similar reasons, banks and ATMs
have been shown to have the same effect (Haberman and Ratcliffe 2015).
The criminogenic effects of bars and other types of alcohol outlets have been demon-
strated repeatedly to generate not only violent crimes but also property crime, in particular
robbery, and mostly likely because of intoxicated patrons might be easy targets for robbers
and thieves (Bernasco and Block 2011; Conrow et al. 2015; Groff 2011; Roncek and Maier
1991).
Especially during rush hours, transit stations (bus stations, subway stations) are crowded
places that offer opportunities for theft, in part because travelers may be distracted and
not vigilant in their attempts to find the way to their destinations. Many studies have con-
firmed that crime rates are elevated in and around transit stations (Bernasco and Block
2011; Block and Block 1999; Block and Davis 1996; Clarke et al. 1996; Haberman and
Ratcliffe 2015; Qin and Liu 2016).
In sum, the extant literature provides empirical evidence for the fact that locations where
people congregate, often in large crowds, are more likely to be selected as crime sites by
motivated robbers and thieves. This is particularly true for locations with functions that
potentially indicate larger benefits or the presence of vulnerable and non-vigilant victims.

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 837

Social Disorganization

Social disorganization has been identified as a community attribute that can apply to geo-
graphic areas of various sizes (e.g. street blocks, neighborhoods or districts). Although not a
true crime generator (crime generators are facilities with a specific function), it is an observ-
able attribute of communities that attracts offenders, because it provides them with oppor-
tunities to offend under the veil of anonymity and with low risks of bystander intervention.
In the extant literature, which mostly covers cities in the United States and in other
western industrialized countries, social disorganization is defined as the inability of local
communities to realize the common values of their residents or solve commonly experi-
enced problems, such as local crime (Kornhauser 1978), and has theoretically and empiri-
cally been associated with concentrated socio-economic disadvantage, residential mobil-
ity, and ethnic heterogeneity (Bursik 1988; Sampson et al. 1997). However, in the Chinese
context, social disorganization and concentrated disadvantage in cities have been associ-
ated primarily with concentrations of non-local migrants (Zhang et al. 2007b), who have
recently migrated into the city and lack a Hukou status (Hou 2010). Hukou is a household
registration system in China that separates locals and ‘nonlocals’ in the allocation of public
resources (Song et al. 2018c). It allows registered individuals—locals, who have Hukou
status—to apply for public welfare services with respect to housing, education and medical
insurance. It is challenging for nonlocals to obtain the Hukou status and thereby get access
to these welfare facilities, especially for rural workers who have migrated to the city and
have experienced segregation from locals, poverty and reduced well-being (Du et al. 2017).
Similar to measures of ethnic heterogeneity in the Western case, concentration of ‘nonlo-
cal’ residents has become an important indicator of social disorganization and crime risk in
contemporary research in China (Liu et al. 2018; Zhang et al. 2007b).

Mobility Flows

According to opportunity theories of crime, the mobility of offenders is conditioned by the

mobility of the general population (Cohen and Felson 1979). In other words, as offend-
ers move around the city they will generally follow the footsteps of the population and go
where everyone else goes (Boivin and D’Elia 2017). Thus, as we argue below, criminal
activities and legal activities share some common rules.
Most people who live in urban areas, including offenders, travel on a daily basis in
order to pursue activities that are distributed in space, such as work, shopping or leisure.
However, the mobility of persons is not random. Instead, people are constrained by cer-
tain spatial and temporal conditions (Hägerstrand 1970; Miller 2005). Research in social
geography has demonstrated that patterns of mobility are strongly related to personal
attributes. Hanson and Hanson (1981) used a transportation survey to study the relation-
ship between socio-demographic characteristics and travel patterns, and found that gen-
der, education, and income affected individual travel patterns. Their findings have been
replicated in subsequent research. Schwanen et al. (2008) used activity diaries from 420
adults in 270 households in Columbus (Ohio, USA) and found that women face more
constraints on their routine activities than men do. In response to questions about how
easily they could change their activities (e.g. laundry, cooking, paid labor) to another
location or time of day, women reported their activities to be less flexible than men,
both in time and space. Zhou et al. (2015) compared the out-of-home activity spaces of

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838 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

low and high income groups in Guangzhou (China), and concluded that the segregation
between both groups not only applies to where they live, but also to the places and areas
they visit during daily routine activities.
Recently, the accessibility of large volumes of geo-referenced mobile phone data
has provided researchers with promising opportunities to study daily mobility patterns
(Kwan 2016). Song et al. (2010b) used data of phone users and showed daily mobility
to be very predictable. Gonzalez et al. (2008) also used tracking data of phone users,
and found that human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity,
each person being characterized by an individual travel distance and a high probability
to return to a few highly frequented locations.
Similar patterns seem to characterize the mobility of offenders. Griffiths et al. (2017)
used mobile phone data records of offenders involved in four different UK-based ter-
rorist plots, in the months preceding their attacks. They found that the offenders visited
only a very limited number of places, and pursued their activities mainly close to their
home or safe house location. This pattern resembles the mobility pattern of the gen-
eral population. Ratcliffe (2006) demonstrated that spatiotemporal patterns of property
crime are strongly influenced by the temporal constraints experienced by the young peo-
ple who committed these crimes, and that these temporal constraints are very similar to
the constraints that non-offenders are subjected to.
These findings are in line with the opportunity theories of crime (Brantingham and
Brantingham 2008; Cohen and Felson 1979), which also assert that offenders’ crime
journeys are not very different from the journeys they make when not perpetrating
crimes. This seems not only plausible for crimes that took place in response to unex-
pected opportunities or provocations, but also for crimes that were premeditated. In case
of premeditated crimes, one would expect the offenders to use their pre-existing spatial
knowledge to select the target and to escape the crime scene after the offence.
Two studies addressed the relation between the mobility of offenders and the mobility
of the general population. Felson and Boivin (2015) formulated a ‘funneling hypothesis’
asserting that daily mobility flows of an urban population determine where crimes take
place. They used a large-scale (N = 165,000) transportation survey to estimate the daily
numbers of people visiting each of the 506 neighborhoods of a large city in Eastern Canada
for purposes of work, shopping, recreation and education. The volumes of both violent and
property crime in a neighborhood were strongly associated with the number of trips (for
work, shopping or recreation) having the neighborhood as their destination.
An even more convincing argument is provided by another study that used the same
transportation survey in the same study area. Rather than modeling crime volumes per
neighborhood, Boivin and D’Elia (2017) modeled the crime trip volumes between all pairs
of the 506 neighborhoods (i.e., how many crimes were perpetrated in neighborhood j that
were committed by offenders living in neighborhood i, for all 506 i and j). One of their pre-
dictors was an estimate of (non-crime) trip volumes between the 506 neighborhoods. Their
results indicated that both for violent and property crime and both for crime committed
by youths and by adults, the volume on non-crime trips between two neighborhoods was
significantly positively associated with the number of crime trips between these two neigh-
borhoods. This finding suggests that the mobility patterns of general population provide a
template of ‘funnel’ for the mobility of offenders, including their journeys-to-crime.
Building on this finding, in the present study we investigate whether, in addition to dis-
tance and crime generators, daily mobility flows of the urban population help predict where
individual thieves commit crimes. As described in the next section, daily mobility flows are
measured using anonymized tracks of mobile phone users in the general population.

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 839

Data and Methods

Study Area and Spatial Unit of Analysis

The data for the present research originates from ZG City,1 a city located in southeast
China. ZG City has a total population in excess of 5 million, and is one of the largest and
most developed cities of China. It belongs to the subtropical zone and the temperature fluc-
tuates between 15 and 32 °C, so there is no extreme cold or hot weather and seasonal vari-
ations do not affect mobility.
The study area is located in the central part of ZG City, and covers more than 3000 km2.
The daily mobility pattern of the urban population is a key variable in the present research.
Because commuting volumes and distances in China are strongly and positively related to
size and prosperity of cities (Engelfriet and Koomen 2017), the choice of ZG city assures
that we study a city with a highly mobile population.
The census unit was chosen as the spatial unit of analysis because census units have a
size similar to those in comparable studies (Bernasco and Block 2009; Clare et al. 2009;
Menting et al. 2016), because census units are approximately equally sized, and because
in the study area they are relatively homogenous in terms of population composition. In
addition, a practical advantage is that the use of census units does not force us to estimate
spillover effects (effects of attributes of nearby units on crime in a focal unit) which is a
requirement if small units of analysis are used, such as census blocks or street blocks (Ber-
nasco et al. 2013; Groff and Lockwood 2014).
Using census units as spatial units of analysis implies that we aggregate numbers of
crime generators to the census unit level, and thus sum the numbers of schools, restaurants,
bus stops and other facilities per census unit. This is not just a practical necessity because
all relevant theoretical constructs must be aligned to the same spatial resolution, it is also
legitimized by the observation that crime generators produce mobility flows and presence
of people in the streets where they are located and in their wider environments.
The size of census units is 1.62 km2 on average (standard error 2.99 km2, minimum
0.02 km2, maximum 31.30 km2). The mean population is 5956 (standard error 4706, mini-
mum 245, maximum 51,450). The study area comprises 1891 census units in total, of
which 275 are not included in the analysis because the lack mobility data due to limited
coverage of the GSM mobile phone network, leaving 1616 census units in the analysis. In
the section on mobile phone data, we explain why we use census units to locate the cell
towers.
Distances between census units are the Euclidian distances in kilometers. For use in
the analysis, per offence we calculated the distances between the census unit where the
offender lived and all other census units in the study area. Following Menting et al. (2016)
and other prior crime location choice studies, the distance to the offender’s own census unit
of residence was defined as the average distance between two random points in the census
unit, which approximately equals half the square root of the size of the area (Ghosh 1951).
A total of 595 incidents (17.3%) were committed in the same census unit as where the
offenders lived. The average distance of the 3436 crime trips was 5.02 km and their stand-
ard deviation is 6.43.

1
Access to crime data was granted by the police authorities on the condition that the real name of the city
would not be mentioned in publications.

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840 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

Crime Data: Theft from the Person

Registered crime data were obtained from the police authorities of ZG City. All crime data
are recorded incidents of theft from the person (TFP) in which at least one offender was
arrested and prosecuted. It includes the date of the incident and the home addresses of the
offenders and the location where the offence was committed.
TFP is a very common offence in China and elsewhere. It covers theft and attempted
theft of items (e.g. cash, phone) directly from the victim without the use or threat of phys-
ical force. TFP includes both snatch theft—in which the victim is aware of the act—as
stealth theft—in which the victim is unaware of it (e.g. pickpocketing). TFP does not
include thefts with ‘break and enter’, like residential or commercial burglary, or theft from
closed vehicles. Theft from the person targets people rather than buildings, vehicles or
other objects. It is therefore a very appropriate crime type to explore the relation between
the mobility of the general population and the target choice of offenders.
Because the home location of the offender is an essential element of the model, the
data used in this study contain only detected cases, i.e. cases where a suspect was arrested,
identified and prosecuted. The clearance rate of theft from the person in ZG City was 5.2%
in 2014, which implies that approximately 1 in every 20 thefts leads to the arrest of an
offender.
In the original dataset, there were 10,276 cases of TFP committed by 12,670 offenders
between June 1st, 2014 and May 30th 2016. The month of February in both 2015 and 2016
was excluded, because during this the Chinese Spring Festival takes place, and a large pro-
portion of the population leaves ZG city to celebrate the lunar new year with their families
in their hometowns. This temporary change might alter the regular mobility patterns of
both offenders and potential victims.
Because data on the daily mobility patterns of the urban population was only availa-
ble on weekdays, only TFPs on weekdays were selected for the analysis. Unfortunately,
as in many other studies (e.g., Vandeviver et al. 2015) a substantive percentage of cases
had to be excluded from the analysis for lack of geographic detail. In 6118 cases either no
offender address or no TFP location was available. After selections, the remaining 4019
offences committed on weekdays and with valid location information were committed by
4798 offenders in total. The fact that offenders outnumber offences implies that some TFPs
are committed by co-offending groups.2 Because estimation results might be biased if
offences committed by multiple co-offenders would incorrectly be analyzed as if they were
independent observations, and in line with recommendations in the crime location choice
literature (Bernasco and Nieuwbeerta 2005; Townsley et al. 2015) only solitary offending
was selected for inclusion in the analysis,3 leaving for the analysis 3436 cases of TFP.4

2
Of the 4798 TFP offenders, 4730 (98.6%) were involved in a single TFP, 55 were involved in 2 TFPs, 6
were involved in 3 TFPs, 5 in 4 TFPs, 1 in 5 TFPs and another 1 was involved in 17 TFPs.
3
Of the 4019 TFPs, 3436 (85.0%) were committed by a single offender, 423 (10.5%) where committed by
two offenders, and 92 (2.3%) were committed by three offenders. The remaining TFPs were committed by
offender groups of sizes 4–10.
4
By way of robustness check we also estimated an alternative, in which only a single offender was selected
randomly from a co-offending group, and including in the analysis. The resulting estimates were very simi-
lar to those on solitary offenders reported here, and can be obtained from the authors.

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 841

Crime Generators

The list of potential crime generators is sheer endless, but included are those facilities
that seem most relevant based on the extant literature and taking into account the Chinese
context: the numbers of primary schools, middle schools, hospitals, basic stores, markets,
supermarkets, restaurants, cinemas, bars, banks, subway stations and bus stops per cen-
sus unit. All of them are so-called ‘point of interests’ (POIs) that were purchased from
Daodaotong, a mapping and navigation company, which provides the original map data
for China’s largest search engine (Zheng and Zhou 2017). These POIs in ZG city were col-
lected in 2014.
Primary schools include kindergartens and elementary schools. Potential TFP victims
are not the pupils but the adults (usually parents or grandparents) who gather near the gates
of schools around the school exit hour to pick up their children. Most middle school stu-
dents are not picked up by their parents and would be potential TFP victims themselves, as
the middle schools are also very crowded at school exit hours, creating opportunities for
TFP. As presented in the descriptive statistics in Table 1, there are 1.28 primary schools
and 0.36 middle schools on average per census unit.
Hospitals refer to general hospitals, which in China are always busy places. Basic stores
include shops for daily supplements and for clothes. With an average of 5.22 per census
unit they are quite common. Markets comprise open air markets as well as ‘integrated mar-
kets’ that mainly sell food. Banks include both banking business offices and automated
teller machines (ATMs). Restaurants, cinemas and bars are popular entertainment facilities
that attract crowds, and subway stations and bus stops attract large volumes of people who
are in transit. As for public transportation, each census unit has 3.19 bus stops but only
0.07 subway stations on average.
In addition to counting crime generators that are facilities, we also calculated the popu-
lation heterogeneity for each census tract. In the Chinese context, segregation does not fol-
low racial or ethnic lines as they do in many western countries. In Chinese cities, the main
attribute that distinguishes locals from non-locals is their Hukou status. Non-local com-
munities where few residents have local Hukou status are generally characterized by high
levels of anonymity, weak social attachments among residents and serious social disorder
problems. Across all census units the mean proportion of non-locals is 0.34.
Table 1 also contains a correlation matrix of the crime generator variables. The cor-
relations between the crime generator counts are low. The only one stronger than 0.50 is
the correlation between the number of restaurants and the number of supermarkets. As a
consequence, there is no reason for concern about collinearity issues.

Mobile Phone Data

To measure population mobility across the study area, we use the tracked data of mobile
phone users. There is a burgeoning literature using mobile phone location tracking to study
the movement patterns and travel behavior of human populations (Asakura and Iryo 2007;
Yang et al. 2014). An advantage of mobile phone data over transportation surveys is that
mobile phone data are not forced into a specific origin–destination format that restricts the
measurement to start and end locations. Mobile phones monitor the location of the popula-
tion continuously without assuming origins, destinations or intentionality. Another advan-
tage is that the measures are taken automatically and unobtrusively and do not require
active participation of research subjects.

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 842

13
Table 1  Descriptive statistics and correlations of census unit characteristics (counts of crime generators and % nonlocals)
Mean SD Min Max 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Primary schools 1.280 1.321 0 8 1

Middle schools 0.357 0.732 0 5 0.208* 1
Hospitals 0.216 0.551 0 4 0.072* 0.113* 1
Basics stores 5.224 18.111 0 313 0.086* 0.045 0.102* 1
Markets 0.368 0.695 0 8 0.243* 0.092* 0.080* 0.079* 1
Supermarkets 1.530 2.640 0 25 0.362* 0.140* 0.034* 0.148* 0.307* 1
Restaurants 11.152 13.835 0 122 0.396* 0.253* 0.139* 0.322* 0.280* 0.544* 1
Cinemas 0.036 0.196 0 2 0.004 0.018 − 0.015 0.237* 0.021 0.034 0.120* 1
Bars 0.193 0.666 0 11 0.140* 0.029 0.126* 0.105* 0.070* 0.052* 0.324* 0.051* 1
Banks 1.835 2.724 0 42 0.217* 0.142* 0.111* 0.247* 0.140* 0.209* 0.448* 0.140* 0.224* 1
Subway stations 0.074 0.285 0 3 0.007 0.033 0.012 0.038 0.062* 0.032 0.141* 0.119* 0.052* 0.281* 1
Bus stops 3.188 4.605 0 102 0.297* 0.191* 0.081* 0.084* 0.150* 0.406* 0.428* 0.100* 0.080* 0.291* 0.142* 1
Non-locals (%) 0.340 0.236 0 0.974 0.217* 0.070* − 0.022 0.096* 0.261* 0.460* 0.319* − 0.006 − 0.02 0.098* − 0.019 0.266* 1

SD standard deviation
*p < 0.05 (two-sided)
Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 843

The data of the locations of mobile phone users in this research was provided by a major
mobile phone service provider in China that has a market share of 22.5% (Chong et al.
2015). Song et al. (2018a) used the mobile phone users’ data from the same provider to
measure ambient populations, and argued that there are no major systematic differences
between the customers of different mobile phone providers, which suggest that our sample
of mobile phone users is representative for the general population in ZG City. Like Xu
et al. (2016) using mobile phone data of 1 day to measure activities, our mobile phone data
contains tracking information of the routes taken by the mobile phones on the network
hour by hour on Wednesday, December 28, 2016, a fairly regular day in ZG city.
In this single day, there were 2994 million users for whom a total of 30,632 million
locations were recorded by the telecom provider. Note that cellular signaling data involves
any behavior that creates a relation with the cell signal tower, such as Internet search, mes-
saging and voice calls. Multiple times per minute the 4G phone network determines which
of its phone towers is nearest to the mobile phone, if the phone is being used.
The tracking points are location estimates based on the census units where the phone
towers are located that provide network communication services. The reception area of a
tower varies from as little as a few meters in central area to a few kilometers in suburban
areas, resulting in some uncertainty about the user’s precise location (Song et al. 2010a).
In ZG city, the distribution of towers is of high density. The mean distance of a tower
to the nearest tower is 136.4 meters, with a standard deviance of 255.8 (Min: 0.0; Max:
5535.1; 50%: 48.3 m; 75%: 137.6 m; 95%: 589.4 m). The average size of the 1616 cen-
sus units is 1.62 km2. It can be deducted that most of the service area of the cell tower is
located within one census unit. Therefore, it seems acceptable to allocate the locations of
cell phones to the census units where the tower is located that they are connecting to.
To protect the privacy of the mobile phone users, the telecom company gave us access to
an aggregated dataset that did not include all measured location points.5 Instead, it includes
for each mobile phone and for each hour, the location of the cell tower that has been the
nearest tower most of the time during that hour. For example, if between 2 pm and 3 pm a
mobile phone has been near tower A for 20 min, near tower B for 30 min and near tower C
for 10 min, the estimated location between 2 pm and 3 pm is the location of tower B.
The aggregated dataset contains for each user 10.2 cell tower hours/locations on aver-
age. Half of the users had more than 7 h/locations. During the remaining hours, the phone
users were either sleeping, performing activities during which they did not use their phone
(e.g., work, school, travel) or moving outside the areas covered by the network. Although
an average number of just over 10 space–time measures per respondent may appear to be a
sparse measure of mobility, it probably implies that the recorded locations are places where
the phone users spend nontrivial amounts of time and therefore correspond to meaningful
activity nodes. Moreover, an average of 10 locations may cover most of the phone users’
activity spaces. According to empirical findings on human mobility based mobile phone
trajectories, humans have a strong tendency to return to places they visited before. At any
point in time, the number of familiar locations an individual visits is limited to approxi-
mately 25 locations (Alessandretti et al. 2018), and they spend more than 80% of their
time in their 10 most frequented locations (Gonzalez et al. 2008; Song et al. 2010a). In a
subsequent aggregation procedure that we ourselves implemented, each phone tower loca-
tion was assigned to the census unit in which it was located. The result is a data file that

5
Even at this level of spatial resolution, only four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify
95% of the phone users (Montjoye et al. 2013).

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844 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

records for each mobile phone user and per hour in which of the 1616 census units they
were located.

Calculation of Mobility Streams

The resulting information was subsequently used to construct a measure of the volume of
mobility flows between all pairs of census units. The measure is defined as the number of
unique mobile phone users that visited both census units on the same day. Mobility flows
were calculated by summing phone users over all pairs of census units. The result is a
square matrix of census units containing the number of mobile phone users that visited
both census units on a single day.
Our use of mobile phone locations diverges from how prior studies on crime in Lon-
don (Bogomolov et al. 2014) and in Osaka, Japan (Hanaoka 2018) have used such data in
research on crime. These prior studies used mobile phone users’ locations as a measure
of how many people were present at a specific location at a specific day or time, which
has been referred to as the size of the ambient population or the actual population at risk.
Other studies have measured the ambient population with other data sources, such as the
Landscan Global Population database (Andresen 2006; Andresen and Jenion 2010), geo-
references Twitter messages (Malleson and Andresen 2015), or public transportation trans-
action data (Song et al. 2018b). Our measure is different from measures of ambient popula-
tion because it measures how many people visit two different locations during a single day.
It thus measures mobility, not just presence.
By linking all census units where a specific mobile phone was observed during the day,
we construct a measure of observed mobility between pairs of census units: the mobility
between census units A and B is the number of mobile phone users visiting both census
unit A and census unit B on the same day (irrespective of how frequent and how long the
visits are). The average across all pairs of census units is 466 individuals, with a standard
deviation of 16.54. In the analyses, we only use pairs in which at least one of the census
units included the home location of a TFP offender, and therefore all other pairs are dis-
carded. Although the distribution is positively skewed, the number of pairs with a zero
mobility flow is limited. Almost half (47.7%) of the 0.5 × 1616 × 1615 ≈ 1.3 million census
unit pairs had a zero mobility flow (meaning that nobody of the 2.9 million users visited
both locations on the same day). For those pairs that were included in the analysis (because
they included at least one offender’s census unit of residence), this percentage was 37.7%.
Finally, to arrive at a measure that could represent the likelihood of an offender living
in census unit A to offend in census unit B, we define the relative mobility between A and
B. The relative mobility is a percentage calculated as the ratio of the mobility flow and the
total number of mobile phone users visiting the home census unit of the offender on a sin-
gle day (also irrespective of frequency and duration), and multiplying the result by 100. It
is hypothesized that the probability of an offender living in area A will offend in area B is
proportional to the percentage of visitors to A who also visited B (the relative mobility flow
from B to A is therefore different form the relative mobility flow from A to B). By using
the relative measure we standardize for the total number of people visiting the census units

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 845

Mobility flow A-B

400

F (A→B) = .4
Census Unit B (target)
Census Unit A

(N=1000) Census Unit C (target)

F(A→C) = .9

900
Mobility flow A-C

Fig. 1  Conceptual model of relative mobility flow with a numerical example. F(A → B) is defined as num-
ber of people visiting both A and B on the same day (400), divided by the total number visiting A on the
same day (N = 1000). F(A → C) = 900/1000 = 0.9. F F(A → A) = 1

where the offenders live.6 A stylized example is shown in Fig. 1. Suppose that an offender
lives in census unit A and there are only two other locations, census units B and C. Our
aim is to assess whether the relative mobility between census units A and B and the rela-
tive mobility between census units A and C impact the probability of the offender selecting
either census unit B or C, and our best guess is that these location choice probabilities are
proportional to the relative mobility flows, i.e. to 400/1000 and 900/1000 respectively. It
should be emphasized that the mobility between two census units (for example A and C)
does not mean that the mobile phone users must live in either census unit A or census unit
C. They can also be two of the users’ other activity nodes.
In the models, to account for the fact that the distributions of both distance and relative
mobility are positively skewed, their logarithms are taken (after adding a value of 1 to the
relative mobility to prevent taking the undefined logarithm of 0).
As most human mobility is over short distances and the frequency of trips decreases
with distance (Gonzalez et al. 2008), we should expect the volume of mobility between
census units to be inversely related to their distance. This is indeed the case, although the
correlation is far from perfect: after taking logarithms it is − 0.37.

Models

Following the large majority of previous location choice studies, we used the conditional
logit model to analyze the role of distance, crime generators and daily population mobility
in the offenders’ choice of locations for committing TFP. The conditional logit model is
easy to estimate and consistent with random utility maximization theory (McFadden 1973).
As Bernasco (2010) provided a fairly extensive treatment of the model in the context of

6
Empirically, models including (the logarithm of) the absolute mobility flow as a covariate yielded very
similar results as models (the logarithm of) the relative mobility flow. Conceptually, the relative measure is
superior as it accounts for the ‘centrality’ of the offender’s census unit of residence.

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846 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

crime location choice, here we confine ourselves to a brief summary, using terms that fit
our application to TFP in ZG City.
According to the model, a decision-maker i (the TFP offender) choses a single alterna-
tive n (a census unit) from a set of 1616 mutually exclusive alternatives (census units). The
offender determines the level of utility Uin that he or she would derive from targeting each
potential census unit, and chooses the census unit that will provide most utility. The utility
level Uin is a linear function of the characteristics of the census units (or their logarithms):
Uin = 𝛽D log(Din ) + 𝛽F log(Fin ) + 𝜷 X Xn + 𝜀in
where Uin is the utility that offender i would derive from census unit n, Din is the distance
between the home census unit of offender i and census unit n, Fin is the relative mobility
flow between the home census unit of offender i and census unit n, and Xn is a matrix rep-
resenting the other characteristics of the census units (number of primary schools, number
of bus stops, etc.). The βD, βF, and βX are the parameters associated with the logarithm of
distance, the logarithm of relative mobility flow, and the other variables in the equation,
respectively. They are estimated based on the actual location choices observed, and their
estimated values indicate the impact of the characteristics on the outcome of the offender’s
location decision. The term εin is an error term that reflects unmeasured other choice cri-
teria affecting Uin. If the error term is Extreme Value Type II distributed, it can be derived
that the probability that offender i chooses census unit n equals:

e𝛽D log(Din )+𝛽F log(Fin )+𝜷 X Xn

Pin = ∑1,616
j=1
e𝛽D log(Djn )+𝛽F log(Fjn )+𝜷 X Xn

In presenting our results, we include the estimated coefficients expressed as odds ratios
(i.e., transformed into ­eβ), the corresponding z-value and an indicator of the level of statis-
tical significance of the coefficients. The independent variables haven’t been standardized
because the unstandardized results are easier to interpret and because the aim is not to
compare effect sizes across the independent variables. We present the results of two alter-
native models. The first model includes the distance as well as the crime generators, but
not the mobility measure derived from the mobile phone locations. The second model is
identical to the first model, but with the mobility measure included.
The estimated coefficients are most easily interpreted when they are transformed into
odds ratios (ORs). ORs with values between 0 and 1 indicate negative effects: a one-unit
increase in the independent variable (e.g. number of bus stops) decreases the odds of vic-
timization by a factor equal to the OR. OR values above 1 represent positive effects: a one-
unit increase in the independent variable increases the odds by a factor equal to the OR. To
judge relative fit between multiple models, we use MdFadden’s Pseudo R ­ 2, the Akaike’s
information criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) as benchmarks.
Larger values of the Pseudo R ­ 2 and smaller values of the AIC and the BIC indicate better
model fits.

Findings

In Table 2 we present the estimation results of the two models. In Model 1, the presence of
schools, markets and bars is not significant. All other facilities, appear to function as crime
generators. This also applies to the proportion of nonlocal residents, which we assume

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 847

Table 2  Results of conditional logit model of the choice of census unit to commit theft from the person
Variables Model 1 Model 2
Odds ratio z Odds ratio z

Crime generators
Primary school 1.002 0.110 0.993 − 0.450
Middle school 0.961 − 1.670 0.959 − 1.750
Hospital 1.135*** 4.430 1.125*** 4.030
Basics stores 1.004*** 6.340 1.004*** 6.590
Market 1.055* 2.510 1.039 1.730
Supermarket 1.027*** 5.310 1.025*** 4.750
Restaurant 1.018*** 14.540 1.016*** 12.980
Cinema 1.154* 2.020 1.149 1.940
Bar 1.008 0.360 1.014 0.690
Bank 1.031*** 8.200 1.030*** 7.780
Subway station 1.570*** 10.340 1.565*** 10.120
Bus stop 1.031*** 19.580 1.029*** 17.410
Social disorganization
Nonlocal proportion 1.198* 2.020 1.138 1.430
Distance (ln(km)) 0.178*** − 117.040 0.217*** − 69.470
Relative Mobility flow(ln) – – 1.292*** 11.040
Model information
Pseudo ­R2 0.298 0.301
AIC 35,649.27 35,512.87
BIC 35,838.69 35,715.81
# Observations (TFPs × census units) 5,552,576 5,552,576
# Thefts from the person (TFPs) 3436 3436
# Census units 1616 1616

***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01,*p < 0.05 (two-tailed, based on robust standard errors)

reflects a relative social disorganization that increases the risk of being targeted by the TFP
offenders. As all other estimates are significant and have values above 1, the presence of
these facilities in a census unit significantly increases the likelihood that it is selected for
committing a TFP.
Subway stations, cinemas and hospitals are large-scale facilities and also seem to
have the largest effects: with one more subway station, cinema or hospital in the census
unit, the odds of being chosen increases by 57.0, 15.4 and 13.5% respectively. In terms
of effect size, the other facilities (basic stores, restaurants, bars and bus stops) are less
influential, which must be related to their smaller scales. A one-unit increase in the
proportion of non-locals in the census units (being the difference between nobody
being non-local and everybody being nonlocal) increases the odds of the unit being
targeted by 19.8%. Proximity (the logarithm of distance) has a very strong positive
effect on the offender’s choice of a target area: the closer to the offender’s home, the
more likely a census unit is to be chosen as a crime site.
Model 2 extends Model 1 by taking into account the population mobility between
census units. In line with the hypothesis, the odds that an offender selects a census

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848 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

Table 3  Pseudo ­R2 of conditional logit models with (1) crime generators only, (2) relative mobility flows
only and (3) distance only, (4) distance and relative mobility flow, 3436 thefts from the person and 1616
census units

Model (1) (2) (3) (4)

Crime generators and Relative mobility Distance (ln) only Distance (ln) and
social disorganization flow (ln) only relative mobility flow
(ln)

Pseudo ­R2 0.045 0.193 0.260 0.270

AIC 48,518.13 40,998.54 37,554.39 37,044.98
BIC 48,694.02 41,012.07 37,567.92 37,072.04

unit as a crime location significantly increases with the strength of mobility between
this census unit and his or her own census unit. The finding suggests that the mobil-
ity volume does indeed reflect offenders’ whereabouts. We expected that the inclusion
of population mobility would capture a considerable proportion of the legal and ille-
gal whereabouts of offenders, and thereby attenuate the effect of distance. Indeed, the
inclusion of the mobility measure does reduce the effect of distance, as it is weaker in
Model 2 (odds ratio = 0.217) than in Model 1 (odds ratio = 0.178). The attenuation is
limited, however, and distance remains an important predictor of location choice in its
own right.
The inclusion of population mobility flow hardly affects the values and significance
levels of the other estimates, as they are similar in Models 1 and 2. The main changes
are that the effects of the presence of markets, cinemas and the proportion of nonlocals
are smaller and lose significance in Model 2.
In terms of the model fit, the improvement is not that significant. Pseudo ­R2 of
Model 2 is 0.301, which is within rounding error of the Pseudo ­R2 value of 0.298
observed in Model 1. However, with decreases larger than 120, the differences in both
the AIC and the BIC from Model 1 to Model 2 are significant,.
As shown in Table 3, we further estimated four more parsimonious models to test
how each of the theoretical constructs—crime generators and social disorganization,
distance, mobility flows, and the combination of distance and mobility flows—would
predict TFP locations in isolation of the other constructs in Table 2. The values of
Pseudo ­R2, AIC and BIC show that in terms of model fit, distance outperforms mobil-
ity flow, but both distance and mobility flow fare much better than crime generators.
In other words, knowing the census units of all crime generators in ZG City hardly
helps us predict where an individual offender will perpetrate a TFP, while knowing the
locations in ZG City visited by people who also visited the offender’s census unit of
residence provides a much better prediction. According to the R ­ 2 criterion, however,
distance still generates the best prediction. Although statistically significant, the addi-
tion of mobility only marginally improves model fit.

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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 849

Conclusion and Discussion

Routine activity theory and crime pattern theory are opportunity theories of crime. Their
key assumption is that crime feeds on legal activities, either because offenders encounter
unforeseen criminal opportunities while engaged in legal routine activities, or because their
routine activities inform them about criminal opportunities that they exploit at a later point
in time.
The present study was inspired by this assumption. Its purpose was to explore whether
knowledge of the daily mobility pattern of the population across urban space furthers the
explanation of where offenders choose to commit thefts from the person.
Based on unobtrusively recorded locations of anonymized mobile phones of a large pro-
portion of the population, we created a mobility matrix between all pairs of the 1616 cen-
sus units in a large city in China, and demonstrated that, after accounting for distance and
the presence of crime generators, offenders were indeed more likely to offend in census
units with large mobility flows connected to their area of residence.
This finding provides support for opportunity theories of crime, as it suggests that to a
considerable degree the ‘journey-to-crime’ follows the mobility of the general population.
An offender living in a particular area will commit crime in a target area with a probability
that is proportional to the relative mobility of the population between the two areas, i.e. to
the number of people that visit both areas as a percentage of those visiting his or her home
area. However, theoretically, it should be emphasized that the mobility flow measure in
itself does not add a new element to the crime equation. It should be interpreted as a useful
correction on the estimated effects of distance and crime generators. In the next paragraph
we explain why.
Distance is an imperfect measure of the friction that constrains the mobility between
two locations. Greater distance reduces mobility, but there are more factors affecting the
friction between locations. In addition to distance, physical barriers (such as rivers and rail-
road tracks) and social barriers (such as cultural and language differences between the two
locations) may further increase these constraints, while connectors (like high-speed trains,
cultural similarity or a shared language) may reduce it. Because our mobility measure
based on mobile phone locations represents actual mobility, it could easily pick up some of
the variation created by barriers and connectors that are not captured by distance. Further-
more, with travel distance fixed, the mobility measure did contribute to explaining where
offenders went to commit TFP.
With regard to crime generators, a similar issue of unobserved heterogeneity arises,
because it is likely that in our analysis we missed some facilities that function as crime
generators, such as beaches, sport stadiums or city parks. In addition, we may have missed
some variability within the same crime generator category (e.g., some bars may be more
‘risky’ than other bars, see Eck et al. 2007). If we did miss some types of crime generators,
or if we missed some variability within a single crime generator category, the mobility
measure is likely to capture this omission by attributing the effect of this facilitator to the
mobility measure. From the comparison between the effects it appears that in the predic-
tion of theft from the person, the mobility measure performs much better than the presence
of crime generators.
The fact that mobility can easily pick up effects of omitted variables made us expect
that the inclusion of mobility would significantly reduce the independent effect of dis-
tance. As a matter of fact, we would not have been surprised to see the mobility measure
completely take over the distance effect. This expectation is not confirmed, however,

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850 Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854

because the effect of distance remains dominant even after including mobility flows in
the equation. This finding may suggest that even within their activity space, thieves still
have a preference for relatively nearby targets. It might also be a signal that the mobil-
ity of the general population does not perfectly align with the mobility of the offender
population. Possibly, some or most offenders have routine activities and spatial patterns
that are different from those of non-offenders. In particular, their daily mobility patterns
might be more spatially constrained than those of the general population, as this could
also explain why the effect of distance remains dominant even after including the mobil-
ity measure in the equation. Therefore, our findings provide a specific interpretation of
the claim of routine activity theory that “illegal activities feed upon the legal activities
of everyday life”. Our findings suggest that illegal activities do indeed feed upon the
legal activities of the general population, but also that offenders are more constrained by
their limited action radius than other members of the population.
Core variable estimates like those of distance and most crime generators seem to
function in line with what we know from other studies (Ruiter 2017). Distance is the
key factor that prevents offenders from selecting targets away from their homes, and the
presence of crime generators is the key factor that attracts crime. Furthermore, in terms
of model fit, the Pseudo R ­ 2 of our models is just around 0.30, a value that is comparable
to the ones reported in other studies of crime location choices.
Nevertheless, there are also some differences with results of the effects of crime
generators reported in the literature. Elsewhere, the presence of high schools has been
shown attract offenders in cases of robbery and theft from vehicle (Bernasco and Block
2009; Townsley et al. 2015) while our results indicate the opposite for TFP. It is not
immediately clear whether the cultural context, the type of crime or other factors explain
this discrepancy. One possible explanation is that Chinese schools tend to be tightly
managed (with entry controls) and most require students to wear uniforms, making them
less attractive than the schools in U.S.A and other Western countries. Bars do not seem
to impact TFP crime location choices. A likely reason is that bars are not as popular in
China as they are in Western countries, and few Chinese would consider going to bars
for leisure. The proportion of nonlocals is a special measure that specifically applies
to the Chinese social environment. It does not seem to be a major importance for TFP
location choices.
As any study, ours is limited in various ways, and some caveats must be made. First, our
analysis ignores temporal variation. We did not include the timing of thefts from the person
or the timing of population mobility flows. Neither did we take into account variation in
opening hours of facilities during the day. In future work, the inclusion of temporal vari-
ation in both crime and population mobility will provide a better testbed for opportunity
theories, because it allows researchers not only to verify that crimes are more likely to
happen at certain time of the day, but also to test whether location choices of theft from the
person are driven by the same choice criteria in the morning as in the evening (van Sleeu-
wen et al. 2018). Because mobile phone activity logs include time stamps that tell us not
only where people are, but also when they are there, population mobility flows can also be
distinguished by time of day. In fact, a next generation of research could add time use data
collected with surveys (Haberman and Ratcliffe 2015) or with smartphone apps (Ruiter and
Bernasco 2018) to enrich the available data by measuring what type of activity individuals
are involved in (e.g. traveling, working, shopping), presumably affecting their victimization
risk.
Second, we did not explore any differences between co-offending and single offending.
The members of co-offending groups were excluded from the analysis, as they may live in

13
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Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2019) 35:831–854 851

different communities, and therefore their spatial decisions are much more complex than
those of solitary offenders (see Lammers 2017).
Third, only the data of 4G users of one mobile phone network provider is available in
our research. Although the 4G network is very popular in China, the sample of users whose
phones were tracked may not be fully representative of the population of ZG City.
Fourth, only theft from the person was studied here. This is a ‘street’ crime character-
ized by a low rate of reporting to the police (Zhang et al. 2007a). To what extent popula-
tion mobility flows impact the spatial behavior of those who commit other types of crimes,
including crimes against static targets, such as burglary, remains an open question. The
approach adopted here, in particular the use of cell phone data to measure population
mobility, might prove useful in in future research that addresses this question.
The abovementioned caveats should not dwarf the contributions of the present study.
In addition to applying a new mobility measure based on tracking the locations of indi-
vidual cell phones, this study contains two other new elements to the discrete crime loca-
tion choice framework. It has been the first to apply the framework in the Chinese context,
and it has been the first to apply it to theft from the person. The findings demonstrate that
Chinese offenders committing theft from the person decide on target areas in ways that
resemble the choices made by burglars and robbers and other types of offenders elsewhere
in the world. This may be viewed as tentative evidence that the underlying opportunity
theory could be applicable not only in the industrialized world, but also in other countries.

Acknowledgements This work has been supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC).

Funding The fund was provided by Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant
No. 41531178), Research Team Program of Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China
(Grant No. 2014A030312010), National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars (Grant No. 41522104),
National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFB0505500, 2018YFB0505503) and Key Project
of Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou City, China (Grant No. 201804020016).

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Interna-
tional License (http://creat​iveco​mmons​.org/licen​ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the
source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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