Crime, oportunidade e vitimização

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the profi- le of victims of property and personal crimes in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The considered characteristics of the victims were the personal attri- butes, socioeconomic conditions, daily habits, family aspects, and envi- ronment characteristics. The estima- tion method used is the Logit Model, which estimates the victimization probability. For that we used indivi- dual data of the Victimization Re- search realized by the Institute of Cri- minality and Public Security (Crisp) between February and March of 2002. The results suggest that perso- nal attributes aren’t really important to explain the profile of victims of property crimes. On the other hand, for personal crimes, age is funda- mental. Youngsters are more proba- ble of being victims of this kind of crime than older people. Furthermo- re, the probability of being aggressed is higher if the subjects walk at night in public ways or live in places whe- re gunshot sound is heard. Environ- mental characteristics and opportuni- ties seem to be crucial for the occurrence of these kinds of crimes.