Offender insight into Australian stolen goods markets from 2002–2017: the DUMA survey as a 16-year window into property crime offenders’ target selections and disposal

ABSTRACT

Since 2002, seven iterations of the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) programme survey have asked arrested offenders about their stealing behaviours, including questions relating to stolen goods target selection and disposal. Throughout this same time period, stealing and domestic burglary rates in Australia have steadily declined. This paper examines the DUMA data with these high-level acquisitive crime trends in mind. Survey findings point to offenders having shifted away from stealing increasingly devalued electronic consumer goods for resale purposes, and toward stealing increasingly expensive food and clothing for personal consumption. This is consistent with what would be expected according to Consumer Price Index data, the opportunity-based CRAVED framework, and offender domain expertise. Applied and theoretical implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• DUMA
• crime opportunity
• property crime drop
• situational crime prevention
• stolen goods markets

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from third author, Rick Brown, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Of the remaining 524 offenders involved in the survey, 18% gave no response, while 34% stated that they did not know why property crime had declined (Brown, 2015). Also of note, 72 of the 470 offenders who did respond to the question expressed disbelief that property crime had gone down, or a belief that it had gone up (Brown, 2015).

2 The CRAVED framework outlines the attributes of goods which make them more susceptible to theft according to analysis of consistent hot products: concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable, and disposable (Clarke, 1999).

3 It is worth noting that some of the locations of the DUMA programme survey have varied over this time period – a point that is addressed in the discussion of limitations in the conclusion section.

4 Hereafter just referred to as ‘the stolen goods survey addenda’.

5 With the exception of some fluctuation in ‘consuming them’ in the 2005 survey iteration.

6 There are good methodological reasons to exclude this iteration due to the small sample size of detainees reporting having stolen something in the past 12 months in this iteration relative to the other iterations, as well as a disproportionately high number of ‘no responses’ suggesting that the interview protocol may have changed after the first iteration.

7 Offender research has consistently shown that offenders are influenced by immediate risk-reward-effort of the offending opportunity context rather than the (sentencing) consequences of offending, once (or if) processed by the criminal justice system, ruling out the likelihood of a large-scale influence of sentencing on the switching of offender target choice towards shops and away from houses. Furthermore, given the steady increase in burglaries without loss and stable/increasing rates of burglaries with entry over the period of the crime drop (Quinn & Clare, 2021b), it is not plausible to explain this shift through appeals to the increasing implementation of security at residential properties.

8 While it is plausible that some drug users are stealing consumables to reserve other funds for purchasing drugs, it is not clear that there would have been a systematic shift in the frequency that this was occurring in the offender population over the period of interest.