Towards a Comprehensive Research Plan on Opportunity Theory and the Crime Falls

Over the past 20 years, dramatic, unexpected and unprecedented falls in crime occurred in many countries. In the UK, for instance, crimes measured by the British Crime Survey fell 50 percent between 1995 and 2010 (Flatley et al., 2010). Yet, as mentioned in earlier chapters and discussed in the next and final chapter to this book, there is little agreement amongst criminologists about either their explanation or their policy implications. Key previous hypotheses drawn from United States’ (US) data are inapplicable elsewhere and cannot offer any explanation for why some crimes, particularly mobile phone theft and Internet-related crimes, had increased concurrently with drops in other crime types (Flatley et al., 2009; Farrell, Tilley, Tseloni and Mailley, 2010).

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