Theft from the person in urban China: assessing the diurnal effects of opportunity and social ecology

Opportunity theories and ecological theories are commonly used to explain spatial crime patterns, but diurnal variations in these patterns have received little attention. Furthermore, the theories have been developed in Western countries, and it has remained unclear whether they are also applicable in China, and how their core concepts can be measured in the Chinese context. We use official crime data from a large Chinese city to investigate whether neighborhood rates of theft from the person are related to characteristics of the population (ecological perspective) and to the presence of transport and retail facilities that shape daily activities (opportunity perspective). We test whether effects of these characteristics differ between daytime and nighttime. Our findings demonstrate that both theories are applicable to crime analysis in China, and that temporal variations should not be ignored. Furthermore, care is required regarding the operationalization of the concepts.