How Many Ways Do Offenders Travel -- Evaluating the Activity Paths of Offenders

According to the Journey to Crime theory, offenders have a directionality preference, in the form of an activity path, when they are moving about in their environment in search for criminal activities. Using clustering techniques, this theory is tested using crime data for the Province of British Columbia, Canada. The activities of 57,962 offenders who were either charged, chargeable, or for whom charges were recommended were analyzed by mapping their offense locations with respect to their home locations to determine directionality. Once directionality was established, a unique clustering technique, based on K-Means clustering and modified for angles, was applied to find the number of activity paths for each offender. Although the number of activity paths varies from individual to individual, the aggregate pattern was very consistent with theory. It was found that people only have a few activity paths, even if they are highly prolific offenders.