Virtual Burglary

Claire Nee: They don't want to be seen. They'll be looking for lightweight, portable cash, jewellery, electronic items, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: Once the burglar finds it, it's gone. And so are they.

Claire Nee: My name's 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.

Speaker 2: 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.

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 in 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 the risk around their homes and their environment generally. And we're going to use that to find the absolute best way to teach householders to reduce the risk around their homes. And that should also hopefully not increase their fear of crime. Another major aim 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 being kind of underestimated in rehabilitation. And even if someone, you know 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.

Speaker 2: First, she observes how they rob a real home.

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 size 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 there.

We have increased the amount of money we spend on security on our houses, but 50% 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, etc. 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 discriminant 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 streets in full view of everybody with an Xbox under his arm.

Speaker 2: Since people aren't typically signing up to have their houses ransacked, Claire's been working on an alternative.

Claire Nee: Recently our team at the University of Portsmouth has been collaborating with the University of Sussex and the University of Twente and a lab 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 going to make my way round the back. Have a little look around.

Claire Nee: In order to move around, you can use the arrows in the mouse. Like in real life, you have to get close up to the doors and the handles of the drawers and click on them to, you know, make it as real as possible.

Expert burglar: I'm going to go straight to the top of the house, upstairs to the top of the house, and work my way down.

Claire Nee: The impact of emotion when an offender is 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 in 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, it's your adrenaline's pumping, your heart is beating really fast and you know that any point the owners of the house could come past, could come back to the house or equally, even the neighbours. Makes perfect sense to walk out the back – there's an alleyway out the back.

Non-burglar: I'll probably go to the front door just because it feels a little bit more safer, a little bit more secure going through the front, and probably a little bit more naturalistic from the back door. It's a little bit nerve-wracking, to be honest.

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 to drop everything.

Non-burglar: So I'll probably leave through the front door as well. Just it seems a little bit more natural to go for the front and I feel too nervous going through the back anyway. I just closed the door behind me to make sure. It seems normal.

Claire Nee: We can really see that the kinds of expertise we'd expect to see in the real environment were very 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.