The expertise of experienced burglars puts them streets ahead of householders, and even well ahead of other criminals, according to a new study.
The results could lead to a step-change in how we fight this crime.
Dr Claire Nee, of the University of Portsmouth, leading a team of international researchers from the Netherlands has pioneered the use of virtual environments to study crime.
In the first re-enactment of a burglary by experienced burglars, other criminals and those with no criminal experience, 160 people were asked to scout a virtual neighbourhood, choose a house to burgle and burgle it.
The results revealed a striking degree of knowledge and skill by experienced burglars in choosing which home to target, how to navigate inside and what to take, revealing unprecedented insight into crime prevention.
Using virtual reality to understand the mindset of a burglar
Could virtual reality help to prevent burglaries?
Watch Dr Claire Nee, a Forensic Psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, use virtual reality to understand the mindset of a burglar while they're committing the crime.
Intro music
Dr Claire Nee: They don't want to be seen. They'll be looking for lightweight, portable, cash, jewellery, electronic items, that kind of thing
Narrator: Once the burglar finds it, it's gone and so are they.
[Dr. Claire Nee, Reader in Forensic Psychology]
Dr Claire Nee: My name is Dr Claire Nee and I'm a Forensic Psychologist at the University of Portsmouth. We're interested in the mindset of the burglar. How they make decisions, their behaviour, their emotions, both around the scene of the crime and once they get into the house. And the way we've done that is by comparing very experienced burglars to people with no experience of doing burglary at all. As psychologists, we'd really like to observe behaviour whenever we can. That's because, although it's very helpful to interview people in many situations, their memory will be very prone to error. We know that from decades of research. The problem for us of course is that it's impossible to observe crime while it's actually happening.
Narrator: But what if you could? Today Claire is getting a front row seat as real burglar and non-burglar are taking on a house in this computer simulated neighbourhood to see if they exhibit the same behaviour that they would in real life.
Dr Claire Nee: There's a new way of understanding crime, about what's vulnerable and what's not in a much more accurate way than we could before. And by using that data we can actually teach householders to become more aware of the risk around their environment and their houses and help to reduce the opportunities for burglars. We've got a whole programme of research here at the University of Portsmouth, that looks at how householders assess risk around their homes and their environment generally, and we're gonna use that to find the absolute best way to teach householder to reduce the risk around their homes, and that should also hopefully not increase their fear of crime. Another major frame of the research is to understand the decision making of the burglar. An enormous amount of their decision making is actually automatic and unconscious, and so that's something that's been kind of underestimated in rehabilitation, and even if someone is very serious about desisting from crime, we have to teach them to recognise those unconscious decisions early on in the decision chain that would actually stop them from ever committing the burglary.
Narrator: First she observes how they rob a real home.
Dr Claire Nee: We picked a house that a burglar would typically be interested in. The ends of terraces are always much more vulnerable due to the side and rear access. We saw the burglar dart down the side of the house having come up a dark alleyway. He quickly appraised the general area, scoping it around and looking at the rear access without even glancing at the front of the house, the windows or the doors. We have increased the amount of money we spend on security on our houses, but 50 percent of them said they got in through an open door or window. The burglar very quickly went upstairs to the high value main adult bedroom. He ignored the bathrooms, the children's rooms etcetera. Burglars have often said "I do this on automatic pilot. The only thing I'm listening out for is noises that signify that someone is returning, because burglars really really don't want to meet their victims." He was very discriminate about which jewellery he took and found identity documents which are also very valuable. The novice pushed in the front door, spent a lot of time downstairs, really kind of piled everything up, which wouldn't be the case with most burglars. He was trying to take the TV, a very heavy conspicuous item that a burglar would know would be very difficult to walk down the road with. We could see quite clearly and dramatically the difference in the approach of the expert burglar versus the non-burglar, and we call that dysfunctional expertise. We saw the non-burglar exit the house straight out the front onto the main street in full view of everybody, with an X-Box under his arm.
Narrator: Since people aren't typically signing up to have their houses ransacked, Claire's been working on an alternative.
[Software created in collaboration with Dr. Martin White, Creative technology, University of Sussex - Prof. Jean-Louis Gelder, Criminology, University of Twente - Marco Otte, Creative Technology, Vrije University]
Dr Claire Nee: Recently our team at the University of Portsmouth has been collaborating with the University of Sussex and the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and we've been developing virtual neighbourhoods that can be burgled. We've discovered that you can get exactly the same kind of behaviour in a virtual neighbourhood or environment as in a real environment, and that means that we can ethically research crime in action. So that's an incredible breakthrough for us. We're the first in the world to use virtual environments to study how thoughts and emotions impact the offender as they actually carry out the crime and it's really exciting. You can see here, we've got a terrace of five houses, all of which can be entered and burgled.
Expert burglar: I'm just gonna make my way round to the back and have a little look around.
Dr Claire Nee: In order to look around you can use the arrows and the mouse. Like real life you have to get close up to the doors and the handles of the doors and click on them to make it as real as possible.
Expert burglar: I'm gonna go straight to the top of the house, upstairs to the top of the house and make my way down.
Dr Claire Nee: The impact of emotion when an offender undertaking a crime is something that's been neglected for decades and as a research team we're very passionate about understanding that.
We could see both our expert and our non-burglar, the variations in their adrenaline going up and down and that's something we'll be really focusing on in our next research study.
Expert burglar: Yeah, every car that goes past again is your adrenaline, your adrenaline's pumping, your heart's beating really fast and you know that at any point the owners of the house could come back to the house, or equally even the neighbours. It makes perfect sense to walk out the back, there's an alleyway out the back.
Novice burglar: I'd probably go to the front door, just because it feels a little bit more safer and a little bit more secure going through the front. It'll probably look a bit more naturalistic than going through the back door. It's a little bit nerve wracking to be honest.
Dr Claire Nee: A really good example of how the virtual environment elicits the same kind of behaviour is we saw how the non-burglar was trying to pick up huge TVs and large objects just as he was in the real world, and in fact the simulator was kind of saying "sorry you're too heavy, you've got to dump that now." It's telling you you're actually too heavy now so you have to go into the hallway and drop everything
Novice burglar: I'd probably leave through the front door as well because it seems a little bit more natural to go through the front door, and I'd feel too nervous going through the back anyway. I'll just close the front door behind me anyway. It looks normal.
Dr Claire Nee: We can really see that the kinds of expertise you'd expect to see in the real environment clearly mirrored in the virtual environment. We've now used fully immersive headsets, which is great and I really think that this is a huge step forward for the way we understand crime.
Outro music
[University of Portsmouth - Explore our other leading research]
This was the first study in the world to observe burglars as they scoped the neighbourhood, and they covered significantly more ground in the same time as the other groups, appraising the rear of the properties and the ends of the terraces.
Dr Nee said: “This was the first study in the world to observe burglars as they scoped the neighbourhood, and they covered significantly more ground in the same time as the other groups, appraising the rear of the properties and the ends of the terraces. Having entered their chosen property at the back, they quickly navigated upstairs to high value areas focussing on portable, expensive items such as jewellery, laptops and tablets and wallets.
“They were also much more efficient than other criminals and non-criminals, who were far less discriminate in what they stole and spent more time in lower value areas on the ground floor.
“The results showed clear differences in the way burglars navigate and process information in the neighbourhood, compared to other criminals and non-criminals, which we will use to advise homeowners, the police and insurance companies in helping people protect themselves from crime.”
Dr Nee said the use of virtual reality to observe offenders undertaking residential burglary is reaping rewards, giving researchers precise crime prevention information.
“Understanding their expertise is key to protecting yourself from this kind of criminal,” she said. “If we know experienced burglars tend to always do A and then B and then C, on their journey to crime and then inside the property, we can plan our environment and homes to disrupt the burglar, by not having a predictable layout or high value zones, for example.”
In the study, 56 experienced burglars, 50 other criminals, and 55 non-criminals took part in a mock burglary in a virtual neighbourhood of terraced houses.
Each was encouraged to think aloud, telling researchers what was going through their minds as they first scoped the neighbourhood, then entered a house and clicked on things they’d steal.
They could stay in the house for as long as they wanted, and click on as many items as they liked.
One of the burglars said: “You look at what people live in, what people are driving, and you can work out what they may own, may have, what money they might have, what jewellery, whatever it might be, you can pretty much picture it in your head what could be inside a building, inside a garage, inside a cupboard.”
Three quarters of burglars targeted the end of terrace house, choosing the back door to enter, while less than half of the other two groups chose this house, and even fewer chose to enter by the back door.
Burglars spent about nine minutes inside, spending nearly half their time on the first floor.
Non-experts were more chaotic, with no clear pattern in their behaviour and chose larger heavier items such as TVs and PCs that would be difficult to escape with.
Discussing the time he spent in first floor bedrooms, one burglar said: “A jewellery box can have more money than an entire house.”
Another said: “The first thing a burglar does is go upstairs and look for gold. You wanna look for small items, expensive items.”
Burglars were twice as likely to find the three highest value items – a ring, passport and necklace hidden in a jewellery box in a filing cabinet in the study.
Experienced burglars shunned the basic iPad, unlike others, preferring the upmarket version.
Understanding their expertise is key to protecting yourself from this kind of criminal. If we know experienced burglars tend to always do A and then B and then C, on their journey to crime and then inside the property, we can plan our environment and homes to disrupt the burglar, by not having a predictable layout or high value zones, for example.
“For burglars it seems to be second nature to be aware how long they could spend in a house before any hidden alarms would bring police, and which rooms and areas in the house had the highest value, easiest to carry and easiest to sell items,” Dr Nee said.
The researchers noted that the burglars and other criminal group expressed some unease while committing the mock crime, unlike the non-criminals, indicating that the virtual environment was successfully reinstating the experience of undertaking the burglary. The researchers were also surprised how forthcoming they were once within the virtual environment.
Dr Nee said: “A considerable body of research tells us that an expert in any domain, from chess to medicine, processes information in their field in a way that is distinguishably different to a novice. Now we have incontrovertible evidence that this applies to experienced offenders as well.
“Criminals commonly dedicate themselves to a type of crime. An experienced burglar can quickly recognise in any house the layout, ease of access, degree of wealth and security. Once inside, they are quick to identify items that are high in value and easy to carry.
“Law-abiding people are notoriously poor at understanding burglary risk and the opportunities they leave for crime inside and outside their homes.
“We very much hope research like this helps them get inside the expert burglar’s head, giving them much more chance of protecting their property.”
The study was co-authored by Professor Jean-Louis van Gelder at University of Twente, Dr Marco Otte at Vrije University, Dr Zarah Vernham and Ms Amy Meenaghan at University of Portsmouth. It is published in the journal Criminology.