Burglary
Solving Residential Burglary
| This document if published for archival/historical purposes. It will not be updated. |
Home Office Crime Detection and Prevention Series Paper 77 (1996) by Timothy Coupe & Max Griffiths
This paper reports on the findings from a study into how the police investigate and solve residential burglary undertaken as part of the Police Research Group’s ‘Police Operations against Crime’ programme. The study sought to identify ways of solving more residential burglaries while maintaining and, where possible improving the service provided by the police to burglary victims.
Based on research carried out in the West Midlands, this report examines how the police investigate and solve residential burglary and identifies ways in which detection rates could be increased, resources saved and victims’ satisfaction improved.
Main findings
Most primary detections were attributable to activities carried out by the first officer at the scene.
Forty-three percent of primary detections resulted from the offender being caught in the act. However, these successful cases only accounted for 10% of all burglaries reported ‘in progress’, leaving scope for improvement in the 90% of cases where the observed burglar escaped detection.
Witness and vehicle evidence secured most of the remaining primary detections. Some success resulted from further CID investigations, while forensic evidence was used in the detection of a small, but important, subset of cases.
Stolen property had limited use, almost exclusively as supporting evidence, while the analysis of modi operandi or burglary patterns played little role in the investigation or detection of offences.
Although screening of cases by the CID was generally working well, there was some scope to investigate additional promising cases, and exclude more of the ones with a poor chance of being solved.
The report concludes that there is scope to improve primary detection rates by as much as 40%, to 8%, with an overall (primary and secondary) clear-up rate approaching 50%. An increase of this order would itself serve to improve officer resourcing per incident, and facilitate the delivery of further improvements in victim service, and in the solution of burglary cases and other crimes.
Getting a copy
“Solving Residential Burglary” is available as a full report or a summary (both PDF format).
Last update: Tuesday, August 26, 2008