criminology Criminology (from Latin , "accusation", and Ancient Greek , ''-logia'', from λόγος ''logos'' meaning: "word, reason") is the study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is an interdisciplinary field in both the behavioural and so ...

, Mobility triangles are the triangular areas formed by the locations of the victim's home, the offender's home and the crime. They are used to describe spatial patterns of crimes, and to facilitate the classification of crimes based on location. Implicit in the concept is the assumption that the homes of the victim and the offender form ''anchor points'' that govern the crime location. Mobility triangles are related to the criminological frameworks of

routine activity theory Routine activity theory is a sub-field of crime opportunity theory that focuses on situations of crimes. It was first proposed by Marcus Felson and Lawrence E. Cohen in their explanation of crime rate changes in the United States between 1947 ...

and

environmental criminology Environmental criminology focuses on criminal patterns within particular built environments and analyzes the impacts of these external variables on people's cognitive behavior. It forms a part of criminology's Positivist School in that it applies ...

History

Mobility triangles were first described by Burgess in 1925 to describe incidents in which the offender's home and crime location were in different neighborhoods.

Analysis

Following Burgess, mobility triangles were qualitatively analyzed in terms of whether the points of the triangle were in the same or different neighborhoods. The combinations of same and different neighborhood for the points of the triangle are termed mobility triangle ''typologies''. More recently, quantitative analyses of mobility triangles have been undertaken, with statistical analyses based on triangle edge distances, and numbers of offenders and victims.

References

{{reflist Criminology Spatial analysis