Crime Displacement

Types of Displacement

Crime displacement represents an offender’s natural adaptation to place-based policing interventions to avoid detection. There are six recognized types of displacement that can occur:

• 1.
  Temporal —Offenders choose to commit crimes at a different time, such as avoiding police presence that is limited to a particular time of day.
• 2.
  Tactical —Offenders switch tactics to avoid detection, such as switching from selling drugs in open-air markets to selling inside of a dwelling.
• 3.
  Target —Offenders switch targets to avoid detection, such as switching from burglarizing single-family homes to apartments.
• 4.
  Types of crime— Offenders choose to commit a new type of crime, such as switching from burglarizing residences to businesses.
• 5.
  Perpetrator —Offenders that are arrested are replaced by new offenders, such as arrested drug dealers from a gang being replaced by other members of the gang.
• 6.
  Spatial —Offenders choose to offend in locations outside of the police intervention, such as prostitutes moving to different street corners not being watched by the police.

The most frequent concern of place-based policing interventions has been spatial displacement, and as such has been the most frequently researched type of displacement.

From a criminological perspective, displacement should be a concern of researchers and practitioners who are examining place-based policing interventions. Deterministic theories of crime causation, those that state crime is the product of some characteristic of the offender (e.g., subcultural values, lack of self-control, strain), suggest that displacement is an [Page 97]inevitable consequence of place-based policing initiatives. According to these theories of crime, removing the opportunity to commit crime does not resolve the underlying characteristic of the offender. As such, the offender will either commit crime regardless of the police presence and be detected or continue to look for an opportunity to commit crime that will be less likely to result in detection. When crime is examined from the rational choice perspective, displacement becomes a concern because offenders will make rationally bound decisions about offending based on perceptions of risk and reward. Both of these explanations suggest the crucial nature of examining potential displacement effects associated with place-based policing interventions.

...