2017 Volume 22 Issue 2 Pages 153-160
Human behavior is characterized by inherent regularity, and previous studies have confirmed that criminal behavior is no exception. In particular, three distinguishable aspects of geographic offending behavior may be characterized by consistency: destination, distance, and direction. In this study, which focused on the aspect of direction, we carried out Van Daele and Bernasco's (2012) additional tests concerning residential burglary cases in Japan. Similar to Van Daele and Bernasco, we proposed the directional consistency could be verified by mean angulation calculated with the average angle between all possible pairs of offenses in a series and compared these to the thresholds that were simulated using the angles chosen at random by the previous authors. Our results confirmed directional consistency in the cases of residential burglary in Japan. We expect this information will improve the accuracy of estimating the location of the offender's residence in geographic profiling. However, the offenders did not show as much consistency as those observed in the previous study. Furthermore, these findings do not take into account preferences in crime patterns or the environmental characteristics. Therefore, it is necessary to verify the impact of these factors on directional consistency.
