Forecasting Residential Burglary*

Following the recent work of Dhiri et al(1999) at the Home Office predicting recorded burglary and theft for England and W ales to the year 2001, econometric and time series models have been constructed for predicting recorded residential burglary to the same date. A comparison between the Home Office econometric predictions and the less alarming econometric predictions made in this paper identifies the differences as stemming from the particular set of variables used in the models. However, these econometric models adopt an error-correction form which appears in both cases to be the main reason why the models predict increases in burglary. To identify the role of errorcorrection in these models, time series models have been built for the purpose of comparison, all of which predict substantially lower numbers of residential burglaries. The next three years would appear to offer an opportunity to test the utility of error-correction models in the analysis of criminal behaviour.