In this paper we investigate the profile of victims of property and personal crimes in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The considered characteristics of the victims were the personal attributes, socioeconomic conditions, daily habits, family aspects, and environment characteristics. The estimation method used is the Logit Model, which estimates the victimization probability. For that we used individual data of the Victimization Research realized by the Institute of Criminality and Public Security (Crisp) between February and March of 2002. The results suggest that personal attributes aren't really important to explain the profile of victims of property crimes. On the other hand, for personal crimes, age is fundamental. Youngsters are more probable of being victims of this kind of crime than older people. Furthermore, the probability of being aggressed is higher if the subjects walk at night in public ways or live in places where gunshot sound is heard. Environmental characteristics and opportunities seem to be crucial for the occurrence of these kinds of crimes.
Victimization; Crime; Opportunity theory; Statistics; Belo Horizonte
