What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? Near-repeat victimization across different urban morphologies: Evidence from Almaty, Kazakhstan

Serebrennikov D. Kalkanbay S.
January - February 2026 Elsevier Ltd

Journal of Criminal Justice
2026 #102

Near repeat victimization (NRV) is a well-documented phenomenon, yet little is known about how it operates not across cities as a whole but within homogeneous urban morphologies. This study analyzes spatial and temporal patterns of property crime incidents from 2023 across urban morphology belts in Almaty, Kazakhstan. We use both the Knox test and interpretable machine learning (XGBoost with SHAP values) to predict victimization risk across three urban built environments (multi-level apartments, low-income detached houses, and high-income detached houses) based on prior incidents within spatio-temporal windows. The results show that although we observe partial evidence of the “Law of Crime Concentration”, overall NRV effects appear weak in Almaty. The machine learning approach further indicates that close-proximity crimes do not change recurrence risk, whereas more distant events in space and time are linked to higher odds of reoccurrence. Instead of a conventional “near repeat,” we observe a form of “distant repeat” victimization. This pattern suggests a specific type of crime displacement, where the most attractive target is not the site of a prior offence, but one that draws less attention from law enforcement. In addition, the morphology clusters do not differ substantially from one another — the key divide is not between grid-like and organic layouts per se, but between the high-class detached areas in the foothills and the rest of the city. These findings underscore the need to evaluate NRV in non-Western contexts using diverse methodological approaches, with explicit consideration of the urban morphology in which crimes occur.

Interpretable machine learning , Kazakhstan , Near repeat victimization , Property crimes , Urban morphology

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Maqsut Narikbayev Institute for Networking and Development, Maqsut Narikbayev University, Korgalzhyn highway 8, Astana, Z05K8C9, Kazakhstan
Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint Petersburg, Shpalernaya 1, St. Petersburg, 191187, Russian Federation
School of Liberal Arts, Maqsut Narikbayev University, Korgalzhyn highway 8, Astana, Z05K8C9, Kazakhstan

Maqsut Narikbayev Institute for Networking and Development
Institute for the Rule of Law
School of Liberal Arts

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Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026