Abstract
Objectives
This paper examines whether the posting of sticker decals indicating the use of forensic property marking deters burglary.
Methods
The study is a randomized controlled trial (RCT). The sampling frame includes all (N = 6603) single-family houses in the municipality of Aarhus, Denmark, that were burgled once or more during the 4 years prior to the experiment. Houses were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 3378) and control (n = 3225). Treatment houses were offered a free forensic property marking kit and asked to post sticker decals around their front doors indicting their use of the product. Control households were not contacted.
Results
A process evaluation determined that only one-third (n = 1080) of the houses assigned to treatment requested property marking kits and posted stickers as instructed. An intention-to-treat (ITT) effect analysis was based on the full treatment group despite a low (32%) compliance rate. At the end of a 15½-month observation period, the full treatment group had experienced 21% fewer burglaries than the control group – a difference that is both substantively and statistically significant (χ2 = 5.305, p = 0.021 n = 6608). Analysis revealed that the preventive effect was limited to the beginning of the observation period and declined thereafter. It is therefore possible that some of the overall result may have been due to an “availability effect,” i.e., a heightened vigilance induced by the initial contact letter.
Conclusions
The preventive effect of treatment seems incontestable. This said, the full pattern of results suggests that the reduction in burglary was likely due to a combination of treatment and availability effects.
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Notes
Eurostat (2019), the statistical office of the European Union, counts Denmark as having had the highest rate of domestic burglary in Europe in every year of the last 10 years (2017 rate = 7.0 per 1000 residents). Likewise, the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) ranked Denmark first in domestic burglary among 12 European nations in 2010 – the last year for which data were collected (van Dijk 2013a). A smaller, more recent study ranked Denmark highest in household burglary among five European nations in both police statistics and victim surveys (Kruize and Sorensen 2018).
Interestingly, comparative survey data indicate that Danish citizens report a relatively low use of burglary preventive measures as compared to their European counterparts (van Dijk 2013a). This has led some to surmise that Denmark’s high rate of burglary is simply caused by its absence of prevention (van Dijk 2013b).
The rates cited here are based on numbers from the Danish national archive, Statistics Denmark. The astute reader may notice that the national median of 5.1 per 1000 population cited here differs from the Eurostat rate of 7.0 cited in Footnote 1. The discrepancy stems from differences in the way the two sources define burglary. While the numbers from Eurostat include burglaries in sheds and garages outside private homes and in cellars and lofts in multistory apartment buildings, the numbers from Statistics Denmark are limited to burglaries in the residential interior of the home.
In the early 2000s, Sorensen (2004) calculated the nationwide prevalence of burglary, including attempts, in Danish houses (stand-alone plus row/terraced) as 1.9% per year. Among houses that had experienced a previous burglary, 8.2% experienced a second (repeat) burglary within 12 months of the first. As seen elsewhere (e.g., Polvi et al. 1991; Robinson 1998), the repeat risk in Denmark was highest during the 30 days following the initial break-in.
Randomization was tested by comparing the two groups in terms of the mean age and gender of the household’s oldest resident (who was the study’s contact person), the proportion of households that had experienced a burglary within the previous 12 months, and the distribution of houses across Aarhus’s 22 postal districts. The treatment and control groups were found to be exactly equivalent in terms of the first three criteria (mean age 53; 62% male; 24% burgled within past 12 months) and evenly spread across the 22 postal districts.
Official notifications from public authorities regarding taxation, recycling, military service, etc. are sent via an encrypted digital post system that can be read on the website Borger.dk (Citizen.dk). All permanent Danish residents are registered for digital post and are responsible for reading it (except for the small fraction of the population that opts for paper post instead). Like ordinary email, digital post is received – though not necessarily read – on the same day it is sent.
One cannot rule out the possibility that some of the households deemed noncompliant got around to posting stickers after the July 2017 process evaluation. Likewise, it is possible that some of the households deemed compliant removed stickers before the end of the follow-up period. This may be especially likely if a home changed occupants. Finally, it is also possible that some of the control households could have ordered and posted forensic property marking stickers on their own completely independent of the experiment. These possibilities were unfortunately all outside of the experiment’s control.
The follow-up period was originally slated to run a standard 12 months but was extended by 3 months to take advantage of an additional high-risk Christmas season in order to increase the size of the outcome variable and thereby boost experimental power.
Fifty percent of the households requesting a forensic marking kit did so within 18 days of having received the letter of solicitation; 90% within 64 days; and nearly 100% within 85 days.
These cases were each given a weight of 1.0607 while the remaining cases were unweighted, i.e., weight = 1.
The chi-square test is a widely applicable nonparametric tool that makes no assumptions regarding the distribution of the data. The relatively limited assumptions that chi-square does entail are easily satisfied in the current analysis (McHugh 2013).
Under Danish law, the distinction between “burglary in a dwelling” and “theft from a dwelling” hinges on whether the offender has forcibly broken into a property. Crimes are charged as theft if the offender has entered through an unlocked door or open window, or if a resident was home when the break-in occurred. Whether a theft rises to the level of burglary is therefore often coincidental, e.g., was the door locked or unlocked? For this reason, factors that deter residential burglary are also likely to deter residential theft. The experiment therefore includes both residential burglaries and thefts from dwellings in its outcome variable labeled “burglaries.”
All chi square tests of independence are conducted using the weighted data. This explains the slightly elevated sample size used in connection with the chi square test.
Different weights were applied to relevant cases during the first 5 months (w = 1.175) and the remainder (w = 1.0003) of the follow-up period. The very low weight used in the latter part of the follow-up period reflects the fact that almost all T1 and T2 households had registered for the experiment by that time.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Danish foundation, TrygFonden, which paid for the experiment, and the Municipality of Aarhus and East Jutland Police, which initiated the project and asked the Research Division at the Ministry of Justice to evaluate its results. Cecilie Vivienne Attermann, formerly of the Research Division, participated in the planning of the experiment and conducted a preparatory observational study. The evaluation itself, including its statistical analyses, was conducted by Britta Kyvsgaard. Britta Kyvsgaard and David Sorensen interpreted the results of the experiment together and co-wrote the article.
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Kyvsgaard, B., Sorensen, D.W. Do stickers indicating the use of forensic property marking prevent burglary? Results from a randomized controlled trial. J Exp Criminol 17, 287–303 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-019-09409-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-019-09409-7