The Relationship Between Traffic Offending and Other General Criminal Activity: The Role of Alcohol, Time and Place

OBJECTIVE: To explore the relationship between traffic offending and other types of crime. In addition to examine the contributions of alcohol, place and time as predictors of incidents requiring police attendance. METHOD: Participants in the current study were first response operational police officers (N = 500) who completed a modified activity log over a 5 week period, identifying the type, time and location of incidents requiring their attendance as well as the number of incidents that were associated with alcohol (N = 5,184). RESULTS: The results indicate that time, place and incident type all have an influence on whether an incident attended by a police officer is alcohol related. Alcohol related incidents are more likely to occur in particular locations in the late evenings and early mornings on the weekends. In particular, there was a strong association between the occurrence of alcohol related disturbances and alcohol related serious traffic offences in regards to place and time. In general stealing and property offences were not alcohol related and occur in daylight hours during weekdays. CONCLUSIONS: The findings demonstrate the importance of time and place in predicting the occurrence of alcohol related offences thus providing support for place based theories of crime. The findings also suggest that targeting specific offences such as disturbances that are concentrated at certain times and places through problem oriented policing may have potential for reducing serious traffic offences.