ABSTRACT
How and why offenders decide to offend where they do is given little consideration in most geographical modeling of crimes. Geometric calculations are applied to crime location data taking no account of the offender’s cognitive processes. If the offender’s behavior is considered it is usually only in terms of the simple logic of his optimizing his benefits whilst minimizing his efforts. This costbenefit logic tends also to be based on the equally naive assumption that criminals have an informed understanding of the distribution of opportunities for crime. Yet for well over 40 years it has been clear that nobody makes use of his or her physical environment like an efficiently programmed automaton. There are many biases and heuristics built into our cognitive representations of our surroundings that influence what we do where. There is growing evidence that criminals are probably even more prone to these distorted mental representations of what is criminally possible (Canter and Hodge 2000). Future improvement of crime mapping systems will therefore need to take account of this Psychology of Place (Canter 1977).
