Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Page 2: Hypothesistalks about the socio-demographic characteristics but place and type of crime are not socio-demographic characteristics. Need to reword the hypothesis.

Pagraph below the hypothesis: Our theoretical approach is based on rational choice theory (Cornish & Clarke 1986) 73 and routine activities theory (Cohen & Felson 1979). According to rational choice theory, 74 offenders of crime make rational decisions about where to commit crimes based on the 75 evaluation of costs and benefits. According to routine activities theory, the probability of 76 a crime being committed depends on the convergence in space and time of a motivated 77 offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a “capable guardian”.

There is no discussion about rational choice theory.  What are the key ideas behind that theory? Need to explain better why these two theories were chosen and howt they can explain the crime that is going to be analyzed in the analysis section.

Last paragraph on page 2: The structure of the article is as follows: Section 2.1 describes the census data and 90 covariates. Section 2 is devoted to materials and methods with a Subsection 2.1 describing 91 the data and a Subsection 2.2 dedicated to a brief discussion of the possible models to 92 be used in the analysis, Poisson, and Negative Binomial (NB) regressions as well as the 93 software used. The results are presented in Section 3 and the article ends with a section 94 focused on the Discussion and Conclusions (Section 4) and lastly the Bibliography.

Get rid of this paragraph.  Rewrite with just a general overview of the rest of the paper.

Table 1 is not needed.  The variables can be discussed in a paragraph.  Need to make more clear the difference between origin and regionorigin.  

Bottom of page 3: "The place where the crime was committed originally consisted of 94 categories, which 112 have been reduced to the 4 in Table 3 accounting for 90% of the records. None of the 113 remainder amount to more than 1% of the total." Give some examples of the other types that are not included in the table.

Table 4: should use the frequencies of each type of crime in this table. Anyone reading a paper on crime should already know which ones are crimes against people and which are crimes again property, there is no need for a table to show this. Instead maybe write "For the analysis homicide, injuries, robbery with intimidation, etc. are recoded into the crimes again people category while vehicle theft, etc. are recoded into the crimes against property category for the measure of against" 

There should be a frequency table for the dependent and independent variables to give the reader an idea of what the data looks like.  

Under the data processing section (which could use the heading 'data analysis' instead) the author(s) mention descriptive statistics. There is no table showing the descriptive statistics for the sample.  This needs to be included.

Page 4 under data processing: " This flow is obtained by aggregating 124 all offenders coming from their communes. "  This needs to be explained in much better detail.  The reader has no idea how the author(s) aggregated the data, why they aggregated it they way the author(s) did, and what the point of aggregating is.

In some places "studies" is used and in other places "education is used"- need to be consistent or are they two different concepts.  These variable labels cannot be used interchangeably. 

In table six it would be easier for the reader to find the significant variables if they were marked with an asterick 

For the analysis a model should have been run with just control measures and then a second model with the regions added in to see if the demographic variables changed.

In the analysis section there is no discussion of what table says and the interpretation of the numbers.  It would be nice to know how much of the variation in the dependent variable is explained by the control/independent variables in the model.  Change in variance explained could also be discussed if added a second model. Model 1 include the sociodemograph measures and Model 2 include all of model 1 variables plus the region measures.  There is no need to show the year model, since it is mentioned in the write up that none of the years were significant then it does not need to be included in the table.  

The discussion is very short.  There is no discussing the results in terms of the two theories that were used to drive this research.  There was one paragraph about RAT and rational choice theory and that is it.  How did these theories lead to the measures being selected and how can the results be interpreted in the framework of these theories.  

There is no limitations paragraph.  I am sure that there were limitations to this study and the author(s) need to acknowledge what they were and how they handled them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English was fine except maybe some word choice issues. 

Author Response

See our reply on attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

-The only comment I have on the front-end is directing the authors to the Brantingham’s work on “target search” theory. Since this paper is about the journey to crime, the Brantingham’s speak directly to this in their target search work.

 

 

-Authors need to describe to the reader what a commune is, particularly for an international audience.

-How did the authors select the four most common “places?” Is this empirically driven or simply because they are the “most common?” More rationale is needed particularly since place and its influences is very important to this study.

-Did you control for spatial dependence/autocorrelation? Since it is a spatial analysis, this should always be considered.

-The authors need to interpret the results in the results section instead of just adding a Table without interpretation. What coefficients do you use, incident rate ratios? Average marginal effects?

-While you may be able to explain that offenders may leave their communes to commit a crime elsewhere, speculating that offenders “move to crime” – this is not necessarily a longitudinal model so you cannot speak to temporality. Make sure to address this in the limitations.

-What is the “so what” of your conclusions. Offenders may leave their communes to commit a crime, and you are looking at what appears to be large units of analysis. We can’t stop people from leaving their communes, so what other policy implications can be derived?

-The finding that males, with secondary studies, committing crimes in public roads, against property aligns with previous spatial analysis of crime research. Men are more likely to commit crime, those with lower education are more likely to commit crime, public spaces, and property crimes are common locations and crime types, respectively. Now what? What policies would you propose on findings criminologists have been able to show for decades?

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing is needed.

Author Response

see our reply on attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Good job on the revision.