Residents, Employees and Visitors: Effects of Three Types of Ambient Population on Theft on Weekdays and Weekends in Beijing, China.

Objectives: The residential population of an area is an incomplete measure of the number of people that are momentarily present in the area, and of limited value as an indicator of exposure to the risk of crime. By accounting for the mobility of the population, measures of ambient population better reflect the momentary presence of people. They have therefore become an alternative indicator of exposure to the risk of crime. This study considers the heterogeneity of the ambient population by distinguishing residents, employees and visitors as different categories, and explores their differential impact on thefts, both on weekdays and weekends. Methods: We analyze one-year of police recorded thefts across 2104 1 km2 grid cells in a central area in Beijing, China. Controlling for the effects of attractiveness, accessibility, and guardianship, we estimate a series of negative binominal models to investigate the differential effects of the three groups (residents, employees and visitors) in the ambient population on crime frequencies, both on weekdays and during weekends and holidays. Results: Overall, larger ambient populations imply larger theft frequencies. The effect of visitors is stronger than the effects of residents and employees. The effects of residents and employees vary over the course of the week. On weekdays, the presence of residents is more important, while the reverse holds true during weekends and holidays. Discussion: The effects of ambient population on thefts vary by its composition in terms of social roles. The larger role of visitors is presumably because in addition to being potential victims, residents and employees may also exercise informal social control. In addition, they spend more time indoors than where risk of theft is lower, while visitors might spend more time outdoors and may also bring about greater anonymity and weaken informal social control.

Residents' Location-Based Fear of Theft and Their Impact Factors in Guangzhou, China.

While the fear of theft is common and is known to lead to lower satisfaction with life and subjective well-being, current literature regards the fear of theft as a stable psychological state and ignores discrepancies based on location and their influencing factors. To fill these gaps, we selected 74 typical communities and collected 1568 questionnaires throughout Guangzhou. The results show that: (1) the respondents demonstrated significant location-based differences in their fear of theft. Locations including a coach station, a railway station, a bus station, a subway station and a wholesale market had the highest associated levels of fear, whereas locations dedicated to leisure activities, especially those in high-end places, had a lower level of respondents' fear of theft. (2) Vulnerability model, victimization model, community security and built environment can be applied to the analysis of fear of theft around different places, but interpretations of fear do vary widely from place to place.