Consider the last few visits to the grocery store on food shopping day. Of the last five times you went food shopping did you most likely return to the same exact store? For most people the answer is typically: yes! Not a lot of profound theory mixed in with that question but criminologist would explain that all people -- law abiding, those with criminal minds and even the homeless follow daily and weekly traveling rituals called activity patterns.
If you should take three locations to include where you work, where you live, and where you recreate -- they form a geographical pattern, or triangle, called an activity space. Crime analyst use the concept of crime pattern theory to piece together offenders with their offending patterns to distinguish between how offenders search for crime and when they find it by accident.
Those both curious and confused often ask how I manage to track the entire homeless population for north west Hillsborugh county.
The answer is deceptively simple.
If the chronically homeless population don't work, don't have a home they travel to after work and don't generally recreate -- do they have an identifiable activity pattern?
The answer is: yes
But, instead of a triangular activity pattern, the bulk of the population, have a most definite linear geographical traveling ritual up and down the same heavily traveled thoroughfare of Hillsborough Ave.
Human behaviorism explains that when you travel on vacation and look for the ketchup aisle in the unfamiliar layout of your first visit to a different grocery store, you may grow frustrated trying to find the desired condiment shelf in a super mega-store. The homeless are no different as they return to the same watering holes where they know a Lutheran church will feed them at a specific time, location and manner, at the sounding of a 3 o'clock church bell.
An activity pattern would govern a rule of behavior that we have grown accustom to and are most comfortable with, knowing that the owner of the Latin Mini-Mart is more lenient with the homeless loitering behind their store than a neighboring 7-11 might be.
The homeless maintain a pattern they are familiar with as a tenet of street survival which most closely accords with quiet enjoyment as strange as that may sound. They are familiar with the rules of the land, both written and unwritten -- when dealing with the police and those that may be unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless.
A more identifiable component of a social science theory would explain the categorized homeless are merely a subculture, of a much larger, more mainstream demographic group. Because within this subset you have your clicks, your charlatans -- even your outliers and outcasts.
And much like their more mainstream brethren they are undeniably social animals that support each other as part of a shared communal reliance that supports an existing homeless continuum. This communal effect, not unique within the homeless population, is the same supportive structure that comforts the needs and desires of every social animal that is part of an identified community -- subcultural or otherwise.
The hot spot map illustration (upper left-hand corner) is an actual density map which tracked 6 months of my engagement with the homeless on the street. The red or darker the color indicates a higher density of homeless when compared to yellow or lower density of homeless. You can see that their activity pattern is, in fact, linear and follows the main corridor of Hillsborough Ave from Benjamin Rd to the east and Sheldon Rd to the west.
This is where I spend eighty percent of my engagement time and illustrates how I manage an entire homeless population with very little effort.
Steve
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