Geography Of Crime Research Paper

1. Origins

The origins of the geography of crime are found in early nineteenth century interest in cartographic criminology. A French statistician, Guerry (1833), pro-duced maps showing the regional concentrations of crime. His observation that crimes of violence were disproportionately represented in the south of France led him to link criminal behavior and climate. In England, the social reformers such as Mayhew (1861- 62) noted the strong clusters of crimes and criminals in specific areas of cities. Mayhew described the ‘rookeries’ of London where children were ‘born and bred to the business of crime.’ The Chicago studies of Shaw and McKay (1942) established a social science basis perspective on crime or delinquency areas, urban spatial patterns, and gradients and a set of ‘theories’ that underpinned the ecology of crime in the city. The basic premises were that crime had a spatial order; it was not distributed randomly but showed strong and persistent trends to cluster in poorer, disadvantaged environments. Subsequent studies have shown a remarkable persistence of these basic qualities of a geography of crime and, further, have demonstrated that spatial order, clustering, and a link with ‘place’ typify related aspects of the criminal justice system such as sentencing patterns.

2. Information Bases

The geography of crime shares with criminology the problematic nature of the available data. Official crime statistics are suspect because the police record a relatively small minority of offences that actually occur and apprehend an even smaller number of criminals. Approximately 80 percent of offences that occur never enter police records. This ‘dark area’ varies by type of offence. It is very high for offences such as shoplifting or vandalism and low for car theft or homicide and arises from the unwillingness of the public, as victims or observers, to report crime to the police. Reasons for under-reporting range from embarrassment to fear of reprisal to apathy. Police themselves actually observe few criminal events and therefore rely on the public, broadly defined, to notify them when offences occur. Even the remaining 20 percent is further diminished by offences not proceeded with. This under-recording of crime may mean that official data contains biases and deficiencies. Does it over-record offences by disadvantaged youths? Does it under-record white-collar crime? Official crime statistics may reveal more about those who define criminality and administer the criminal justice system than about the actual incidence and seriousness of crime.

The official ‘antidote’ to these concerns about criminal statistics has been the introduction of national crime surveys. Dating in the main from the 1980s, these build upon an older ad hoc tradition of self-report studies and take the form of sample surveys of victimization experience and related attitudes towards crime, justice, law, and/order. National crime surveys have confirmed under-recording and have qualified statements on rising crime rates, which may reflect differential recording practice rather than actual changes in crime. They have also augmented our knowledge of topics such as fear of crime. Whereas national crime surveys have not remedied the deficiencies of official criminal statistics, they have allowed their interpretation in more refined and constructive ways. For geographers, official statistics and national crime surveys are useful for studies of national and regional variations, but many geographies of crime focus on neighborhood variations and ‘crime areas’ within cities.

3. Theoretical Bases

The geography of crime draws upon the generic theories of criminology and social science and its own disciplinary concepts. Criminology has nurtured many theories and a significant lack of consensus. Most embrace a ‘multifactor’ explanation, which, despite diffuseness, is probably correct. There is no single causal explanation for criminality but a ‘package’ of inter-related conditions of varying applicability. Structural theories see criminal behavior as the in-evitable outcome of societies that create inequalities. Yet these macrotheories fail to account for the fact that some individuals who suffer from inequality will react criminally, whereas others will not. Geographers have favored those criminological theories that lend themselves to analyses that allow a focus on place. Social disorganization is one such theory. Originating in the Chicago studies of the 1920s and 1930s, this theory linked crime with areas that lacked social order, established values, leaders, and social networks. Comparisons were made with residential areas that did possess these qualities, were ‘socially organized’ and experienced low rates of crime. Subcultural theory, proposing that crime may be prevalent because it is part of the normal behavior pattern within specific groups, can be found in embryo form in Mayhew’s study of London’s rookeries. Although now argued most consistently in relation to social groups, sub-cultural theory can be articulated in terms of areas or neighborhoods. Social control theory shares common strands with social disorganization and subculture, emphasizing the positive impacts of social control mechanisms in reducing the incidence of criminal behavior. The mechanism may be good parental supervision, an effective school or teacher, or the effects of voluntary organizations or community groups. It is again a theory that can be adapted to a focus on place and has a central concern with the offenders and where they live.

Environmental criminology offers the closest approximation to a geographical ‘theory’ of crime. It emphasises the criminal act and the location at which it occurs, the ‘where’ rather than the ‘why’ of crime (Bottoms 1994). Place is central to an approach that acknowledges that each offence leaves a new point on the map and is a clue to the activity space of the offender. The approach draws in considerations of the routine spatial activities of offenders and victims, the concept of journey to crime, and related ideas of territoriality and surveillance. At the present time environmental criminology is more a methodology than a theory. As such it draws heavily on basic geographical concepts such as space and place, and lends itself to detailed spatial analysis through geo-graphical information systems. Conceptual issues include the problem of attaching any independent significance to space and understanding the full range of meanings attached to place.

4. Approaches To The Geography Of Crime

Studies that merit the description of a geography of crime have changed along with broader paradigm shifts within the social sciences. Cartographic criminology, basically concerned with the mapping of criminal statistics and the representation of spatial patterns, has evolved to reflect wider use of statistical methods including the sophisticated technology of geographical information systems (GIS). Police forces recognize the value of GIS as a part of crime data analysis and the geocoding of criminal events for computer storage has become standard practice. There are clear advantages in the rapid portrayal of crime patterns and the related ability both to measure the features of the spatial pattern and to explore correlation with other environmental indicators. One police analysis of 79 crimes involving a single serial rapist was reported as involving 790,000 calculations using probabilities of journey to crime to link all points on a grid to the known crime sites (Grescoe 1996). Research into the statistical correlates of area crime rates has progressed through a wide range of single and multivariate analyses. The areal units used in such analyses include nations, police force areas, urban car beats, and census tracts; each raises methodological issues of data reliability and measurement. Scale effects, the modifiable areal unit problem, and ‘ecological fallacy’ continue to qualify exercises of this kind. Broadly, the outcomes of these analyses show a high level of consistency revealing strong correlations with indicators of a poor residential environment. Measures such as high unemployment rate, low income, substandard housing, and low educational attainment recur and, less frequently, indicators such as lone-parent families and broken homes. Correlates of this kind have been interpreted as indicative of some more general condition such as social disorganization or weak social control, and particular significance is often attached to single measures such as high un-employment. For the most part, however, the results of this type of analysis remain descriptive; they have value in identifying groups and areas from which offenders are likely to come but are in effect markers of some more general social condition as is the crime rate itself.

Statistical analyses have also been used as a first stage in the study of crime or delinquency areas. After identifying clusters of offenders and the conditions under which they live, the research task then is to probe more deeply with different research methodologies into the nature of the ‘crime area.’ One approach has identified particular neighborhood characteristics that might predispose residents to criminology. Herbert (1976) compared ‘crime’ and ‘noncrime’ areas in a city, controlling for sociodemographic profiles, and found a consistent difference in terms of sets of values and forms of behavior between the two types of area. In the ‘crime’ areas, parents adopted different approaches to control, had a clear tendency to accept some forms of misbehavior, and the children were lower achievers educationally. Other neighborhood studies have focussed on specific issues such as lack of parental supervision. More recently, what might be termed ‘crime area’ studies have taken a known problem area and sought to unravel both its origins and present form. In the United Kingdom, the so-called ‘problem housing estates’ lend themselves to this kind of analysis. Such estates often originated as local housing managers ‘dumped’ known problem families or relocated a slum clearance population to a specific estate. Early episodes of misbehavior rein-forced labeling and reputations that have persisted. The Meadowell Study (Barke and Turnbull 1992) demonstrated a life-style that was permeated by welfare dependency, drug-trading, petty crime, and vandalism. Often self-selection of tenants who opt for this kind of lifestyle builds the area profile.

Understanding why criminal events occur where they do requires different approaches. Criminals respond to opportunities or targets in the environment and the task is to identify these ‘cues.’ A large majority of such crimes are opportunist and involve minimal planning; a minority is ‘professional,’ involving experienced criminals who may spend significant amounts of time preparing for a single criminal event. It is the former that lends itself to analyses based on opportunism and environmental cues. What makes some areas or residential units more vulnerable to crime? First, areas that offer more obvious or lucrative targets for a crime such as burglary are not likely to experience most offences. In part this is a function of security, wealthier neighborhoods are able to defend themselves with security devices and forms of control such as block or neighborhood watch. Research also shows that burglars tend not to travel far to commit an offence (Herbert and Hyde 1985). The offender– residence hypothesis suggests that vulnerable areas are either the areas or are close to areas where offenders live. Neighborhoods have ‘cores’ and ‘borders’ and the border-zone hypothesis suggests that the borders are more vulnerable. The local social control hypothesis suggests that ordered, well-organized neighborhoods with a strong sense of community identity experience less crime; the area variability hypothesis suggests that ‘mixed’ areas experience more. Hypotheses of these kinds, focusing on the places at which criminal events occur, blend into the general approach of environ-mental criminology. So too do studies of incivilities or signs of disorder in the urban environment (Herbert 1993) and the idea that these may indicate a deteriorating situation in neighborhoods. The concept of a ‘community career’ suggests that some localities move through a form of life cycle with highs and lows of criminal activity (Bottoms et al. 1992).

As criminals react to cues in the environment so do potential victims. Fear of crime arises from the perception that parts of the city, types of individuals or groups, and times of the day, are dangerous. People will modify their behavior to cope with fear and to achieve feelings of community safety. Early studies identified residents’ perceived stress areas and showed that these were avoided in everyday routines. Fear of crime is known to be high among old people and women with young children (Valentine 1997). Such groups experience less crime than youths but adopt avoidance strategies to reduce risk. Police have responded with initiatives such as ‘do not speak to strangers’ to protect children, but part of the problem may lie in the design of city environments and conventional attitudes towards time and place.

The step from environmental criminology to ‘de-signing out crime’ and crime prevention has proved a short one. In his thesis on ‘defensible space,’ Newman (1972) argued that places became more vulnerable if they had bad design features, lacked a sense of territoriality, had poor surveillance, and were stigmatized by their externalities. If design could in-corporate the positive qualities, it could create defensible space and become less vulnerable to crime. The most comprehensive test of defensible space principles was provided by Coleman’s (1985) study of housing projects in inner London. She developed a ‘disadvantagement’ score that was made up of measures on a range of indices from presence or absence of overload walkways to alignments of doors and windows. Coleman demonstrated close correla-tions of disadvantagement with crime and argued that less disadvantagement meant less crime. Although criticized for neglect of social dimensions, this work had a high impact on policy and on perceived community safety and quality of life. More restricted research designs, such as those to assess the impact of improved street lighting or CCTV camera surveillance, have produced similar positive results. The caveat with such measures is that instead of reducing crime they can simply displace it to other less well-protected areas. The ultimate in designing out crime is evident in rich suburban enclaves where high technology surveillance devices, walls, gates, and guards are used to protect residents. Davis (1990) wrote of fortress Los Angeles, divided between the protected enclaves of the very rich and the territories of the criminalized poor. Geographical research on social conditions also translates easily into crime prevention policies. Block or neighborhood watch is a direct transfer of ideas on community, surveillance, and social control.

The geography of crime has extended to consideration of policing, sentencing, and the criminal justice system. Early studies showed that sentencing was harsher in certain states and localities: where one committed a crime affected the sentence received. At international scale there are clear differences; Islamic law, for example, punishes an offence differently from European law. Within the United States, Florida tends to have more prisoners on death row and more executions (Harries and Brunn 1978). Studies show that jury composition affects verdicts (Herbert 1994). Magistrates drawn from one class judge offenders from another. Policing as an activity has strong spatial connotations. Police carry images of the city, derived from their experience and passed-on wisdom; these influence the ways in which they police the city. As police patrol areas, they need a detailed understanding of those places; the distributions in space of offenders and offences are key considerations for them. The police often focus their resources on specific areas and/or crimes for limited periods both in terms of community policing initiatives and crime prevention or target hardening. Geographers have studied policing initiatives such as police consultative committees and the ways in which they are constructed. Studies of the so-called ‘victimless crimes’ of prostitution (Shumsky and Springer 1981) suggest that policing practice and the variable workings of the criminal justice system shape their geographies. Beyond policing and the courts is the penal system, and as prison populations rise, their distribution and access are significant.

5. Future Directions

The geography of crime started from a few simple observations of spatial distributions and extended to a variety of applications of basic disciplinary concepts of space, place, and environment. Current thrusts involve developing pattern analysis through sophisticated information technologies, focusing on the meanings and relevance of place, and examining the interfaces between crime, criminals, and the criminal justice system.

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