We're using VR and working with ex-offenders to help prevent crime
Discover how Dr Claire Nee's Virtual Burglary Project is shedding new light on how to stop crime before it starts
Home at last after a hard day’s work, all you want to do is put your feet up with a nice cup of tea. But as you head for the kettle, something feels wrong.
The house feels different, somehow. It doesn’t look quite right. And then it hits you: Somebody has been here. There’s been a break-in. I’ve been robbed.
As you pace from room to room, checking off a mental list of what’s missing and what remains, you feel shocked, angry and sad.
You start to tot up all the practical disruptions and expenses to come – changing the locks, fixing the broken back window, dealing with the police and your insurers. You wonder if you’ll ever feel safe in your own home again.
All you want is for the burglar to be caught and convicted. They have violated your privacy and stolen your property. Who cares why or how?
Dr Claire Nee cares. And it’s a good job for all of us that she does.
Claire is Director of the International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology at the University of Portsmouth.
Her pioneering Virtual Burglary Project uses simulated environments to understand the behaviours, thought patterns and emotions of burglars.
Claire’s research is about making a difference for the victims of crime, and the perpetrators too. Ultimately, she aims to make the nightmare scenario of a break-in less likely to occur, by making important breakthroughs in research.
Why virtual reality?
Claire has proved that Virtual Reality (VR) is a unique way to understand burglars' thought processes and discover the chain of decisions that leads to a burglary. Her discoveries represent a paradigm shift in forensic psychology.
A pioneer in this area, Claire is one of the first in the world to get offenders to re-enact crimes, as opposed to relying on the interview method.
The Virtual Burglary Project has its origins in Claire’s PhD, when she created a simulated residential environment using maps and photos of houses. It gave her lots of information to work with and was fascinating from a crime prevention perspective. VR provides a state-of-the-art step forward.
Claire explains, "When they re-enact their crimes in the virtual environment, they’re not hindered by trying to recall, recreate or reinstate a context that happened years ago.
When VR arrived, I thought it'd be great to use this for re-enacting the crimes. It’s always better to watch behaviour if you can, rather than interview people. VR has them disclose so much more information, because they’re actually doing it.
“Rather than their motivations for committing crimes, I’m more interested in how they enact the crime, the hours and days building up to it, and the aftermath as well. This hasn’t really been looked at before."
Her use of VR came about because of memory flaws and memory misattribution. No matter how forthcoming the burglar, memory simply isn't a reliable source of information. Inaccuracies inevitably creep in.
“Sometimes what you think you did simply didn't happen. There's also the social impact of not wanting to sound like a terrible person."
VR technology gives infinitely richer, more detailed data than just interviewing offenders. It shows that the offenders work fast, scoping their environment, rapidly picking up clues to make an instinctive decision about whether to burgle.
"When VR arrived, I thought it'd be great to use this for re-enacting the crimes. It’s always better to watch behaviour if you can, rather than interview people. VR has them disclose so much more information, because they’re actually doing it.”
A triple whammy
There are three main wins with VR research.
First of all, there's watching offenders in order to understand their cognition and emotions as they approach and undertake the crime – ‘using a past thief to catch a future thief’.
That same information can help educate householders and businesses to better protect their properties. Some offenders simply give up if they can't get in.
Thirdly, the data unearthed by VR can help with rehabilitating offenders.
Using virtual reality to understand the mindset of a burglar
Could virtual reality help to prevent burglaries?
Watch Dr Claire Nee, a Forensic Psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, use virtual reality to understand the mindset of a burglar while they're committing the crime.
Intro music
Dr Claire Nee: They don't want to be seen. They'll be looking for lightweight, portable, cash, jewellery, electronic items, that kind of thing
Narrator: Once the burglar finds it, it's gone and so are they.
[Dr. Claire Nee, Reader in Forensic Psychology]
Dr Claire Nee: My name is Dr Claire Nee and I'm a Forensic Psychologist at the University of Portsmouth. We're interested in the mindset of the burglar. How they make decisions, their behaviour, their emotions, both around the scene of the crime and once they get into the house. And the way we've done that is by comparing very experienced burglars to people with no experience of doing burglary at all. As psychologists, we'd really like to observe behaviour whenever we can. That's because, although it's very helpful to interview people in many situations, their memory will be very prone to error. We know that from decades of research. The problem for us of course is that it's impossible to observe crime while it's actually happening.
Narrator: But what if you could? Today Claire is getting a front row seat as real burglar and non-burglar are taking on a house in this computer simulated neighbourhood to see if they exhibit the same behaviour that they would in real life.
Dr Claire Nee: There's a new way of understanding crime, about what's vulnerable and what's not in a much more accurate way than we could before. And by using that data we can actually teach householders to become more aware of the risk around their environment and their houses and help to reduce the opportunities for burglars. We've got a whole programme of research here at the University of Portsmouth, that looks at how householders assess risk around their homes and their environment generally, and we're gonna use that to find the absolute best way to teach householder to reduce the risk around their homes, and that should also hopefully not increase their fear of crime. Another major frame of the research is to understand the decision making of the burglar. An enormous amount of their decision making is actually automatic and unconscious, and so that's something that's been kind of underestimated in rehabilitation, and even if someone is very serious about desisting from crime, we have to teach them to recognise those unconscious decisions early on in the decision chain that would actually stop them from ever committing the burglary.
Narrator: First she observes how they rob a real home.
Dr Claire Nee: We picked a house that a burglar would typically be interested in. The ends of terraces are always much more vulnerable due to the side and rear access. We saw the burglar dart down the side of the house having come up a dark alleyway. He quickly appraised the general area, scoping it around and looking at the rear access without even glancing at the front of the house, the windows or the doors. We have increased the amount of money we spend on security on our houses, but 50 percent of them said they got in through an open door or window. The burglar very quickly went upstairs to the high value main adult bedroom. He ignored the bathrooms, the children's rooms etcetera. Burglars have often said "I do this on automatic pilot. The only thing I'm listening out for is noises that signify that someone is returning, because burglars really really don't want to meet their victims." He was very discriminate about which jewellery he took and found identity documents which are also very valuable. The novice pushed in the front door, spent a lot of time downstairs, really kind of piled everything up, which wouldn't be the case with most burglars. He was trying to take the TV, a very heavy conspicuous item that a burglar would know would be very difficult to walk down the road with. We could see quite clearly and dramatically the difference in the approach of the expert burglar versus the non-burglar, and we call that dysfunctional expertise. We saw the non-burglar exit the house straight out the front onto the main street in full view of everybody, with an X-Box under his arm.
Narrator: Since people aren't typically signing up to have their houses ransacked, Claire's been working on an alternative.
[Software created in collaboration with Dr. Martin White, Creative technology, University of Sussex - Prof. Jean-Louis Gelder, Criminology, University of Twente - Marco Otte, Creative Technology, Vrije University]
Dr Claire Nee: Recently our team at the University of Portsmouth has been collaborating with the University of Sussex and the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and we've been developing virtual neighbourhoods that can be burgled. We've discovered that you can get exactly the same kind of behaviour in a virtual neighbourhood or environment as in a real environment, and that means that we can ethically research crime in action. So that's an incredible breakthrough for us. We're the first in the world to use virtual environments to study how thoughts and emotions impact the offender as they actually carry out the crime and it's really exciting. You can see here, we've got a terrace of five houses, all of which can be entered and burgled.
Expert burglar: I'm just gonna make my way round to the back and have a little look around.
Dr Claire Nee: In order to look around you can use the arrows and the mouse. Like real life you have to get close up to the doors and the handles of the doors and click on them to make it as real as possible.
Expert burglar: I'm gonna go straight to the top of the house, upstairs to the top of the house and make my way down.
Dr Claire Nee: The impact of emotion when an offender undertaking a crime is something that's been neglected for decades and as a research team we're very passionate about understanding that.
We could see both our expert and our non-burglar, the variations in their adrenaline going up and down and that's something we'll be really focusing on in our next research study.
Expert burglar: Yeah, every car that goes past again is your adrenaline, your adrenaline's pumping, your heart's beating really fast and you know that at any point the owners of the house could come back to the house, or equally even the neighbours. It makes perfect sense to walk out the back, there's an alleyway out the back.
Novice burglar: I'd probably go to the front door, just because it feels a little bit more safer and a little bit more secure going through the front. It'll probably look a bit more naturalistic than going through the back door. It's a little bit nerve wracking to be honest.
Dr Claire Nee: A really good example of how the virtual environment elicits the same kind of behaviour is we saw how the non-burglar was trying to pick up huge TVs and large objects just as he was in the real world, and in fact the simulator was kind of saying "sorry you're too heavy, you've got to dump that now." It's telling you you're actually too heavy now so you have to go into the hallway and drop everything
Novice burglar: I'd probably leave through the front door as well because it seems a little bit more natural to go through the front door, and I'd feel too nervous going through the back anyway. I'll just close the front door behind me anyway. It looks normal.
Dr Claire Nee: We can really see that the kinds of expertise you'd expect to see in the real environment clearly mirrored in the virtual environment. We've now used fully immersive headsets, which is great and I really think that this is a huge step forward for the way we understand crime.
Outro music
[University of Portsmouth - Explore our other leading research]
The cognitive script
Many offenders display a kind of 'expertise' in that they very rarely get caught at the scene of the crime.
Interviewing burglars in prison, Claire discovered that they have cognitive scripts – mental maps which help you complete a task quickly with minimal risk. The offenders say things like, 'I do it on automatic pilot', and 'All my concentration goes on listening out for someone coming back."
We all have these cognitive scripts. Driving is a good example. When we first start learning, there's a huge amount to take in – checking mirrors, changing gear, clutch control, speed awareness – but between around six months to a year, you build up what's called a 'cognitive schema'.
Claire likens these to "a bunch of recipes in your memory about how to do something." Cognitive schemas mount up in our long-term memories, and eventually take over so a task becomes habitual rather than conscious.
Chess players, for instance, can have hundreds of thousands of possible configurations of the chess board in their head at one time. Rather than forming more and more schemas, the ones you have get richer and richer – just as a chef might develop more and more recipes around one set of ingredients.
The burgling mindset
Burglars are what Claire terms “dysfunctional experts.” Even though what they do is obviously criminal, many are ‘good’ at it.
Like all of us, their automatic scripts govern how they live their lives, and committing offences is part of this.
Offenders are usually from socio-economically deprived backgrounds and tend to lead chaotic lives. They haven't had good education or nutrition. They often come from dysfunctional and unsupportive families with no positive role models.
As a result, their brains are set up to be impulsive.
Drugs and violence are usually part of the mix from a very young age, in one form or another. This helps explain the high rates of traumatic brain injury found in young offenders.
It's to do with the amygdala - a primitive area of the brain, linked to self-preservation, threat and reward - and other parts of the brain that govern impulse control. Damage to these areas makes burglars more impulsive.
Rather than their motivations for committing crimes, I’m more interested in how they enact the crime, the hours and days building up to it, and the aftermath as well. This hasn’t really been looked at before.
Drugs and violence are usually part of the mix from a very young age, in one form or another. This helps explain the high rates of traumatic brain injury found in young offenders.
It's to do with the amygdala - a primitive area of the brain, linked to self-preservation, threat and reward - and other parts of the brain that govern impulse control. Damage to these areas makes burglars more impulsive.
Put simply, the burglar who broke into your house probably did so on impulse – but that impulse was built-in as a result of a long, automatic decision chain.
Even though many offenders genuinely want to give up crime, their ‘expertise’ is hard-wired into them. It’s learned through repeated practice, and becomes a mindset which never turns off.
It is actually a self-preservation mechanism – they need money so they fall into automatic patterns, or heuristics (strategies which help us solve problems using past knowledge and experience).
The need to feel validated as part of a group is also part of the burgling mindset. Claire says, "Peer kudos is another aspect of the ‘expertise’, and we can use this in rehabilitation to say to them, 'despite your challenges, you are 'good' at burgling’. So let's turn this ability into something positive and pro-social."
A fresh look at rehabilitation
Claire originally wanted to be a clinical psychologist. As part of the training, she worked with very young offenders in a probation hostel.
There, she saw the almost impossible challenges they’re up against.
Many rehabilitation programmes haven't taken on board that offenders usually offend because of dysfunctional home lives, their resulting automatic scripts, and the people they’re surrounded by. Being in prison with offenders or in a community with ex-offenders makes leaving that life even harder.
Good rehabilitation motivates the offender to want to have a better life. They don’t like going in and out of prison but it becomes a way of life. They’re de-skilled and mixing with other offenders all the time.
What’s more, only the worst 10 per cent of offenders receive rehabilitation. A huge percentage of the prison population go in and out of prison without any rehabilitation support. Is it any surprise they continue to offend?
Old rehabilitation methods focus on negatives and deficits, and try to fix those. An alternative approach is to look at offenders' strengths, work with them to imagine a better life, and map out ways to move towards that life.
Claire says that good rehabilitation "motivates the offender to want to have a better life. They don’t like going in and out of prison but it becomes a way of life. They’re de-skilled and mixing with other offenders all the time."
Crime prevention and education
Householders cannot perceive risk the same way that offenders do. And people don't want to learn to think like a burglar. But it's important to make householders aware that there's plenty they can do to safeguard their homes.
Claire and her team use research straight from offenders’ mouths, to train householders to be more aware of the many opportunities we offer burglars.
"We're learning from the offenders. They advise us where we can improve security around the home. We want people to get better at appraising their environments, without making life inconvenient or increasing fear of crime."
The team have learned huge amounts about where offenders go to immediately in a home, and how they get straight to the high value areas. They’ve used this information to educate people on where not to put really valuable things.
Surprising facts have also been revealed:
"Our first virtual burglary taught us a huge amount about how they scope the environment. We knew they avoided small children’s bedrooms, but we thought that was because there’s not much of monetary value in there. In fact, we discovered the real reason was that it's 'wrong' to go into a baby or a child’s bedroom – a moral code of sorts."
If we can help people make their environments a little less inviting to a burglar, and also help them understand what burglaries and burglars are about, it will help them avoid being victimised.
Claire has worked with Avon and Somerset Police, conducting research in local prisons to give better crime prevention advice to householders. She also works with insurance companies on awareness campaigns, and with victims of burglary.
“If we can help people make their environments a little less inviting to a burglar, and also help them understand what burglaries and burglars are about, it will help them avoid being victimised.”
One campaign Claire worked on focused on how burglars aren't the axe-wielding monsters our imaginations lead us to believe, but usually young people desperately wanting to get in and out very quickly with a few valuables.
She explains, "I want you to feel less afraid by understanding that the offender – most likely a very disadvantaged 19 or 20-year-old with a drug habit – is far more scared of you than you are of them."
Claire's fascination around why people commit crimes is what led her to the University of Portsmouth.
“Portsmouth already had a strong reputation for forensic psychology. Ray Bull was here and he’s made a huge worldwide impact on interviewing child witnesses and memorandums for practice with the police. Tony Gale was also here – a renowned personality psychologist.”
When she joined, Ray asked Claire to start the Centre for Forensic Psychology, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2017.
She says, “Portsmouth has allowed me the freedom to develop something very, very innovative. There is worldwide interest in VR research. It will put our university on the map for being leaders in this field.”
The tool might be virtual reality. But the impact it can have – from reducing our chances of getting burgled, to turning troubled lives around – is very real indeed.