Criminology of Place Research Paper

In recent decades, however, a growing number of scholars have begun to take a very different approach to the crime problem. This approach begins not with the people that commit crime but rather with the places where crime occurs. This is a radical reconceptualization of the crime problem, but one that that is warranted by the reality of crime in the city. Why is it necessary to reconsider the “person-focused” crime and justice model of the last century? The main reason is simply that the yield of this approach has been questioned for more than three decades. Weisburd and Piquero’s (2008) review found that despite the focus primarily on individuals, prediction levels are fairly low and have remained low over time. Lawrence Sherman and colleagues (1989) categorized this new approach as the “criminology of place.” The focus here is on very small geographic areas within cities, often as small as addresses or street segments, and understanding their contribution to the crime problem. It focuses attention on “hot spots of crime,” or crime concentrations in such micro geographic areas and the factors that explain these concentrations over time, as well as the best ways to address these high crime locations. Drawing upon work by Weisburd, Groff, and Yang (2012), this research paper will review the emergence of the criminology of place in recent decades and theoretical perspectives for understanding why places are such an important part of the crime equation. This research paper will also review the main findings from a longitudinal study in Seattle, Washington, by Weisburd et al. (2012) examining the factors that contribute to why streets are high crime (or low crime) over time.

The Emergence Of The Criminology Of Place

Criminologists have traditionally sought to understand why certain people as opposed to others become criminals (e.g., see Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990) or to explain why certain offenders become involved in criminal activity at different stages of the life course or cease involvement at other stages (e.g., see Laub and Sampson 2003). Criminologists have also been interested in places, but they have historically focused on larger geographic areas like neighborhoods or even larger areas like cities or states (see Weisburd et al. 2009). For example, criminologists have often tried to explain why certain types of crime or different levels of criminality are found in some communities as contrasted with others (e.g., see Bursik and Grasmick 1993).

While the individual and “macro” units of place, such as the community, have long been a focus of crime research and theory, only recently have criminologists begun to explore crime at very small “micro” units of geography. The roots of such approaches can be found in the efforts of scholars to identify the relationship between specific aspects of urban design (Jeffery 1971) or urban architecture (Newman 1972) and crime, but broadened to take into account a much larger set of characteristics of physical space and criminal opportunity (e.g., Brantingham and Brantingham 1981). These studies drew important distinctions between the site in question and the larger geographical area (such as the neighborhood, community, police beat, or city) that surrounds it.

But the key to the origins of the criminology of place is a group of emerging theoretical perspectives that developed as a reaction to the limitations identified in offender-based criminology in the 1970s (e.g., see Martinson 1974). In a groundbreaking article on routine activities and crime, for example, Cohen and Felson (1979) suggested that a fuller understanding of crime must include a recognition that the availability of suitable crime targets and the presence or absence of capable guardians influence crime events. Cohen and Felson were to turn traditional conceptions of the crime problem on their head by suggesting that crime could be prevented without changing the supply or motivation of offenders in society.

In the routine activities model, victims, offenders, and guardians were all essential parts of the crime equation. While traditional conceptions had focused on offenders, using data on crime rates in the United States in the post-World War II period, Cohen and Felson (1979) illustrated that changes in other parts of the crime equation could impact the level of crime in society. For example, they found that changes in the value of property or the ease of which it could be stolen affected burglary rates. Decreasing size and weight of electronic devices (e.g., televisions) and the increasing value of goods found in homes were found to be related to increases in victimization. They also found that changes in the presence of “capable guardians” influenced crime. In this case, the entrance of women into the work force and the resulting lack of “guardianship” at homes were associated with significant increases in house burglaries. The routine activities perspective pushed criminologists to extend their vision beyond the traditional concern with the causes of criminality and their focus on offenders. Indeed, Cohen and Felson (1979) took a pool of motivated offenders as a given and focused their attention more on the suitability of targets and the presence or absence of capable guardianship.

Having introduced other elements of the crime equation, Cohen and Felson’s (1979) work naturally led to a focus on crime opportunities. Victims, offenders, and guardians are likely to intersect in physical space. The spatial component of crime thus became a key component of this perspective. As Cohen and Felson (1979, 589) note, “we take criminal inclination as given and examine the manner in which the spatiotemporal organization of social activities helps people to translate their criminal inclinations into action. Criminal violations are treated here as routine activities which share many attributes of, and are interdependent with, other routine activities.”

Researchers at the British Home Office, in a series of studies examining “situational crime prevention,” also challenged the traditional focus on offenders and communities (Clarke 1983). Situational crime prevention moved the focus of the crime equation away from the people who commit crime and instead considered the context of criminal events to be critical. At the core of situational prevention is the concept of rational choice (Clarke and Cornish 2001). In contrast to offender-based approaches to crime prevention, which usually focus on the dispositions of criminals, situational crime prevention begins with the opportunity structure of the crime situation (Clarke 1995). Such opportunities affect whether potential offenders will choose to commit crime. Importantly, such choices are seen to be the result of a decision employing “bounded rationality” (Clarke and Cornish 2001). That is, potential offenders use the limited knowledge about victims or guardians in specific situations that is easily available to consider relative costs and benefits.

Situational crime prevention is concerned with the “opportunity structures” of specific contexts and places. By opportunity structure, advocates of this perspective are not referring to the broad societal structure of opportunities that underlie individual motivations for crime but to the immediate situational components of the context of crime. In this context, crime prevention may involve efforts as simple and straightforward as target hardening or access control and often follows a straightforward and commonsense notion of how to deal with crime problems (Clarke 1995). Importantly, place at a “micro” level is key to situational crime prevention theory since it focuses on the immediate opportunities for crime, which are generally structured within very small geographic areas.

Around the same time as routine activities theory and situational crime prevention developed, Paul and Patricia Brantingham published their seminal book Patterns in Crime, which emphasized the role of place characteristics and human activity in shaping the type and frequency of human interaction (Brantingham and Brantingham 1984). Environmental criminology, also known as crime pattern theory, explores the distribution and interaction of targets, offenders, and opportunities across time and space (Brantingham and Brantingham 1981). Both rational choice and situational opportunities play a key role in crime pattern theory. The concept of place, in turn, is essential to crime pattern theory. Not only are places logically required (an offender must be in a place when an offense is committed) but also their characteristics are seen to influence the likelihood of a crime. Crime pattern theory links places with desirable targets and the context within which they are found by focusing on how places come to the attention of potential offenders.

The Importance Of Examining Crime At A Micro Geographic Level

One implication of these emerging perspectives was that places at a “micro” geographic level should be an important focus of criminological inquiry. While concern with the relationship between crime and place is not new and indeed goes back to the founding generations of modern criminology, the “micro” approach to places suggested by recent theories had just begun to be examined by criminologists (see Weisburd et al. 2009). Places in this “micro” context are specific locations within the larger social environments of communities and neighborhoods (Eck and Weisburd 1995). They are sometimes defined as buildings or addresses (e.g., see Sherman et al. 1989); sometimes as block faces, “hundred blocks,” or street segments (e.g., see Weisburd et al. 2004); and sometimes as clusters of addresses, block faces, or street segments (see Braga et al. in press).

The criminology of place has from the outset fit its units of analysis to its theoretical interests. Routine activities theory (Cohen and Felson 1979), situational crime prevention (Clarke 1983), and environmental criminology (Brantingham and Brantingham 1981) naturally push the cone of geographic resolution to very low levels. Importantly, however, while pushing the geographic study of crime to much lower levels than traditional criminology, these theories did not specify a precise geographic unit for studying crime.

At what level should crime at place be studied? There is an important trend over time toward the study of crime at place at smaller units of geography. But does that trend reflect a fact about the level of geography that is important for understanding crime, or is it simply a result of the specific data available and theoretical interests of scholars? Or is the best approach one that is eclectic in its understanding of crime at place? While the relevance of studying varying geographic units in coming to a more complete understanding of crime at place should not be discounted, it is important to recognize at the outset that studying crime at the “wrong” geographic unit may lead to a very misleading portrait of how place and crime interact. In this context, examining crime patterns at larger geographic levels, even commonly used “smaller” units such as census tracts or census block groups, may mask significant lower order geographic variability.

Importantly, beginning with a micro-level approach allows the researcher to examine the influences of larger geographic units, while starting at higher levels of geography may preclude examination of local variability. Collecting data at the lowest geographic level, or smallest units of analysis, allows one to examine how those trends relate to larger units of analysis at higher levels of geography. But data collection at larger units would not allow conversion to more micro units of analysis. For this reason, Weisburd et al. (2012) used a micro geographic unit – the street segment – as the basic unit of analysis in their study of Seattle. The street segment, however, is not the smallest unit of geography that can be used to study crime. Some scholars have argued for the importance of examining crime patterns across individual addresses or facilities (e.g., see Sherman et al. 1989). Policing data may include significant coding errors regarding a crime’s occurrence at the address level, and so one can be much more confident in the accuracy of crime incident data at the street-segment level, since getting the street of a crime’s occurrence wrong is much less likely than mistaking the specific address location for a crime. There is also strong theoretical justification for the identification of street segments as key behavior settings for crime (see below).

Social Disorganization And Opportunity Theories: Recognizing The Importance Of Theoretical Integration

Criminology of place scholars have looked primarily to what can be termed “opportunity theories” (Wilcox et al. 2003) as an explanation for why crime trends vary at places and as a basis for constructing practical crime prevention approaches (e.g., see Sherman et al. 1989; Weisburd et al. 2004). Routine activities theory, situational crime prevention, and crime pattern theory all place great emphasis on the specific opportunities offered by specific places and situations. In contrast, study of crime at higher geographic levels has placed emphasis on the social characteristics of places, for example, the socio economic levels of people who live in certain areas (e.g., Bursik and Grasmick 1993) or the degree to which there is strong population heterogeneity (Shaw and McKay 1942). Such perspectives may be grouped more generally as social disorganization theories (see Sampson and Groves 1989). These themes are repeated again and again in traditional macro studies of place and crime.

Scholars who study the criminology of place have virtually ignored social disorganization theories in empirical analysis and theoretical discussion. In one sense, this is understandable, since the impetus for study of micro crime places came from opportunity theories. Such theories justified examination of small geographic units because of their emphasis on the specific situations and contexts that make crime possible.

In this context, the neglect of social disorganization in the study of the criminology of place can be traced to what some scholars have called “theoretical competition” (Bernard and Snipes 1996). All theories cannot be right in this perspective, and accordingly it is the job of criminologists to advance a single theoretical paradigm that can explain the phenomenon at hand. But a different perspective is interested in “theoretical integration.” As Bernard and Snipes (1996, 302) write, “(w)e argue that integration is the appropriate approach because the theories primarily make different but not contradictory predictions.” In the context of theoretical integration, one would draw from multiple theories that can increase overall understanding of the crime problem at micro levels of place.

Theoretical integration of opportunity and social disorganization theories in a model for understanding crime at street segments would not make sense if social disorganization was a concept that is irrelevant to the criminology of place. This seems to be the position of many scholars in this area. Sherman et al. (1989, 30), for example, argued in introducing the idea of a criminology of place, that “(t)raditional collectivity theories [termed here as social disorganization theories] may be appropriate for explaining community-level variation, but they seem inappropriate for small, publicly visible places with highly transient populations.” Often this position is taken indirectly, simply by ignoring social disorganization theories (e.g., Eck and Weisburd 1995). Sometimes scholars have specifically recognized the potential relevance of social disorganization to the understanding of variations in crime at micro geographic levels (e.g., Smith et al. 2000). However, such interest is the exception rather than the rule.

There is reason to believe that social disorganization theories are relevant at both micro- and macro-level geographies. Street segments do not simply represent physical entities. They are also social settings, or following Wicker (1987, 614) “behavior settings,” which can be seen as “small-scale social systems.” In this context, street segments can be seen as examples of small-scale communities (see Taylor 1997). People who frequent a street segment get to know one another and become familiar with each other’s routines. Residents develop certain roles they play in the life of the street segment (e.g., the busybody, the organizer). Norms about acceptable behavior develop and are generally shared. Blocks have standing patterns of behavior, for example, people whose routines are regular like the mail carrier or the shop owner. In this context, we can see street segments as “micro communities” as well as “micro places.” They have many of the traits of communities that have been seen as crucial to social disorganization theory, in that these physical units function also as social units with specific routines.

If the street segment can be seen as a type of “micro community,” then social disorganization theory has direct relevance to the criminology of place (see Rice and Smith 2002; Smith et al. 2000; Taylor 1997). For example, street segments, like communities, are often dynamic with people moving in and out as well as shops opening and closing. Such transitions have often been seen to represent heightened social disorganization in studies of communities. Similarly, poverty and social disadvantage have been identified as strongly related to crime at higher levels of geography. Is variability in wealth or social class at the street-segment level also related to trends in crime? Do characteristics reflecting social disorganization vary at a street-segment level of analysis, as they do across communities and neighborhoods? There are critical empirical questions addressed in the Weisburd et al. (2012) study discussed below.

Predicting Crime At Place: Findings From A Longitudinal Study

Weisburd et al. (2012) recently focused on the criminology of place in an effort to advance both theory and practical crime prevention in this area. They examined crime incidents at the street-segment level over a 16-year period in Seattle, Washington, assessing the concentration of crime over time and the geographic variability of crime across the city. They then combined data on a number of physical and social characteristics of the street segments, using variables from both opportunity and social disorganization theories to better understand what factors help explain the distribution of crime at the street level. Their study overall reached five major conclusions that are all discussed in more detail below:

1. Crime is tightly concentrated at crime hot spots, suggesting that one can identify and deal with a large proportion of crime problems by focusing on a very small number of places.
2. These crime hot spots evidence very strong stability over time and thus present a particularly promising focus for crime prevention efforts.
3. Crime at places evidences strong variability at micro levels of geography, suggesting that an exclusive focus on higher geographic units, like communities or neighborhoods, will lead to a loss of important information about crime.
4. It is not only crime that varies across very small units of geography, but it is also the social and contextual characteristics of places. The criminology of place in this context identifies and emphasizes the importance of micro units of geography as social systems relevant to the crime problem.
5. Crime at place is very predictable, and therefore it is possible to not only understand why crime is concentrated at place but also to develop effective crime prevention strategies to ameliorate the crime problem at place.

The Tight Coupling Of Crime At Place

Criminologists have traditionally assumed that crime is “loosely coupled” to place. The idea of loose and tight “coupling” has been used in many disciplines to identify the extent to which parts of systems are linked or dependent to one another. What is meant here by “loose coupling” of crime at places is that criminologists have traditionally not seen the bonds that tie crime to place as very strong, even though it has been clear from the outset that crime occurs in specific settings. Traditionally, criminologists have viewed crime opportunities provided by places as too numerous to make crime prevention strategies targeting specific places of utility for theory or policy.

Recent studies point to the potential theoretical and practical benefits of focusing research on crime places and suggest a “tight coupling” of crime with the places where crime occurs. A number of studies, for example, suggest that there is a very significant clustering of crime at places, irrespective of the specific unit of analysis that is defined. The extent of the concentration of crime at place is dramatic. In one of the pioneering studies in this area, Sherman et al. (1989) found that only about 3 % of the addresses in Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced 50 % of all calls to the police. Fifteen years later, in a study in Seattle, Washington, Weisburd and colleagues (2004) reported that between 4 % and 5 % of street segments in the city accounted for 50 % of crime incidents for each year over 14 years. Weisburd et al. (2012) found that about 50 % of crime is found at just 5–6 % of street segments each year in Seattle over 16 years. More than 20 % of crime incidents were found at just 1 % of street segments.

Research also demonstrates that crime is not only concentrated at a small number of places but also that these concentrations remain stable over time, also reinforcing the idea of tight coupling. Weisburd et al. (2012) found similar levels of concentration for each of the 16 years they observed crime at street segments in Seattle. It is in some sense startling that over 16 years, about the same number of street segments produce about the same proportion of crime, especially since crime declined by more than 20 % in the city during this period. The 1 % of street segments that produce about 23 % of total crime in Seattle began the observation period as the most serious hot spots in Seattle and remained hot spots throughout the time period observed. The relative intensity of crime at these places and the stability over time of this developmental pattern suggest that there are specific characteristics of these places that generate or attract crime. Reflecting a similar underlying structure of tight coupling between crime and place was the more than 80 % of the street segments in the city which had very little or no crime throughout the 16-year period. Here, there would seem to be factors that help places resist or discourage crime.

Street-By-Street Heterogeneity In Crime

While a number of theoretical approaches in recent decades stress the importance of using small units of geography, it is important to demonstrate empirically that a focus on micro places is relevant to understanding the distribution of crime. That is, it could be the case that crime hot spots at a micro geographic level are just proxies for larger community-level hot spots. One could imagine a scenario, for example, where all the hot spots in a city are concentrated in a single neighborhood, which would suggest that neighborhood-level processes might be more relevant to consider.

Weisburd et al. (2012) used a series of geographic analyses to demonstrate that the processes explaining crime patterns at street segments do not come primarily from higher geographic influences such as communities. There were indications of the influence of higher order trends in the data, for example, in the fact that higher crime street segments were not distributed at random and were more likely to be closer to each other than would be predicted simply by chance. But these indications of macro geographic influences were much outweighed by evidence of the importance of looking at crime at the micro level (i.e., street segments). There is strong street-to-street variability in crime patterns in the data, and such variability emphasizes the importance of studying crime at place at a micro unit of analysis.

Predicting Hot Spots Of Crime

Weisburd et al. (2012) were the first to examine the distribution of opportunity and social disorganization factors at the street-segment level over time. The key question here was whether or not variables in these two perspectives were concentrated at street segments. That is, are there hot spots of crime opportunities and hot spots of social disorganization at the street-segment level? And if so, are these hot spots found throughout the city, as crime hot spots are?

They examined four main dimensions of opportunity theory: (1) motivated offenders, (2) suitable targets, (3) guardianship, and (4) accessibility/urban form. Opportunity measures were generally highly concentrated and evidenced strong variability across places. For example, 50 % of high risk juveniles (a proxy for “motivated offenders”) were consistently found on between 3 % and 4 % of the total number of Seattle street segments. In turn, half of all the employees (a proxy for “suitable targets”) in the city were located on less than 1 % of Seattle street segments. These concentrations of opportunity factors also remained fairly stable over time, suggesting one reason for the stability of crime patterns longitudinally.

Weisburd et al. (2012) also found tremendous concentration and variation in most of the social disorganization measures they examined. While prior theory suggested that opportunity factors would be highly concentrated, the results for social disorganization were more surprising. Looking both at structural and mediating variables of social disorganization, they found that there are hot spots of social disorganization at the street-segment level. For example, social disorder is one of the most direct indicators of the inability of a social system to control behavior. Fifty percent of reports of physical disorder in Seattle were found on between 1.5 % and 3 % of street segments. Fully 50 % of truant students (a mediating variable used as a proxy for “unsupervised teens”) were consistently found to live on between 2 % and 3.5 % of the total street segments during the study period. And these hot spots were not simply part of contiguous hot spots at larger geographic levels. They were not found only in specific neighborhoods; rather they were distributed across the city landscape. This suggests that a perspective that has generally been seen as relevant only higher levels of geography shows concentration and variability at the street-segment level.

How do these findings relate to crime concentrations in the city? Weisburd and colleagues (2012) used a multinomial logistic regression to examine the association between opportunity and social disorganization factors and street-segment crime trends. The overall model examined the influence of these factors on eight patterns of trajectories of crime. The focus here is on the comparison between the chronic street segments (that 1 % of street segments responsible for over 20 % of crime) and the approximately 80 % of street segments that were largely crime free over 16 years. How do opportunity and social disorganization variables help to differentiate whether a street segment is likely to be crime free or a chronic crime hot spot? The findings from the multinomial regression analysis overall suggest a high degree of statistical fit between theories of opportunity and social disorganization and crime at street segments. Using a pseudo R2 measure suggested by Nagelkerke, for example, Weisburd et al. (2012) found that the model explained about 68 % of the variance in pattern membership. This suggests that crime at place is very predictable, and even in a fairly early stage of theorizing and empirical research, predicting crime at place can be done with more precision than most models predicting crime in individuals (see Weisburd and Piquero 2008). This also suggests the relevance of an “integrated theoretical approach” (Bernard and Snipes 1996) to the criminology of place. Both opportunity measures and social disorganization measures provide important information for understanding variation in developmental patterns of crime at place.

The multinomial regression results suggested a number of opportunity and social disorganization variables significantly predict whether a street segment is likely to be a crime hot spot compared to being crime free. The two most important predictors of crime hot spots were drawn from the opportunity perspective. Both related to the suitability of places as crime targets. The larger the residential population of a street segment, the more likely it was to be a crime hot spot. Similarly, when there were more employees on a street segment, it was much more likely to become a hot spot of crime. These findings reinforce a more general conclusion of the opportunity perspective. The factors that increase the risks of crime relate directly to the situational opportunities that places present. When more people live on a block, there is more potential for crime because there are more potential victims (and perhaps higher numbers of motivated offenders). When more employees work on the block, they increase the amount of crime on that street, because they are likely to increase the volume of targets on the street. Another indicator of crime opportunities, arterial roads, also increased the risks of crime on street segments markedly. Arterial roads were much more likely to become crime hot spots. Arterial roads are more likely to bring together motivated offenders and suitable targets, because they are easily accessible.

Three variables that reflect the social disorganization perspective also had very large impacts on the likelihood of a street segment being a crime hot spot. The higher the level of physical disorder on a street segment, the greater the likelihood of it being a high crime street segment. This is very much consistent with the idea that an inability of the small social systems to control disorderly behavior will increase the risk of crime. High socioeconomic status, in contrast, acted as a protective factor for crime, with crime hot spots much less likely to be found at places with wealthier residents (as reflected in higher property values) who assumedly are able to bring into play both formal and informal social controls more effectively. Perhaps most interesting was the very strong impact of collective efficacy (see Sampson et al. 1997), as reflected by voter participation. Collective efficacy seems to act as a strong protective factor for crime at place. Accordingly, the direct situational opportunities that increase crime risk are one part of the crime equation at places, but social factors that act to insulate places from crime risks are also important.

Implications

If crime is strongly concentrated at place, and such concentrations are stable over long periods, then it is possible to assume that a focus on crime hot spots can have important crime prevention benefits. The concentration of crime suggests that police or other crime prevention agents can focus on a very small number of targets and have a large impact on crime problems overall. The fact that crime hot spots are stable across long periods reinforces the potential utility of such approaches, because it implies that if crime prevention agents did not intervene, the problem would persist. These are the implications of the tight coupling of crime and place that have been observed in prior studies.

But the potential for the criminology of place in crime prevention is not just theoretical. These basic research findings have been reinforced by evaluations of practical crime prevention efforts. A series of randomized field trials demonstrate that police efforts focused on hot spots can result in meaningful reductions in crime and disorder (see Braga and Weisburd 2010). Braga et al. (in press) found in their Campbell Collaboration systematic review of the hot spots literature that 20 of 25 tests from 19 experimental or quasiexperimental evaluations of hot spots policing reported noteworthy crime or disorder reductions. This strong body of rigorous evaluations led the National Research Council Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices (2004, 35) to conclude “a strong body of evidence suggests that taking a focused geographic approach to crime problems can increase the effectiveness of policing.” Importantly, Braga et al. (in press) also reported little evidence of crime displacement as a result of hot spots programs. Crime did not simply move around the corner as a result of police intervention.

But if important causal mechanisms underlying developmental patterns of crime at place can be found in factors such as economic deprivation or collective efficacy, then a much broader set of social interventions may also be required to change the trajectories of crime at crime hot spots. The focus on the specific places where crime problems are found provides an opportunity to “lower the scale” of social interventions and accordingly to make such interventions relevant to crime prevention practitioners. It is one thing to attempt change in the social conditions of an entire neighborhood or city. It is another to try to ameliorate problems on specific blocks. Perhaps the criminology of place provides a scale of intervention that can rekindle interest in the importance of social and structural interventions in doing something about crime. The work of Weisburd et al. (2012) suggests the importance of focusing crime prevention, whether it is at the level of local police agents or in terms of the development of social programs for hot spots of crime. Whatever the approach that is taken, it is time to recognize the need to focus crime prevention resources at micro places such as street segments.

It is important to note that despite the wealth of data Weisburd and colleagues (2012) were able to gather on street-segment characteristics, they were limited because of retrospective data collection. These data availability issues suggest the importance of a prospective longitudinal study of crime at place that would capture at specific times both the characteristics of places and people (see Weisburd, Lawton, and Ready 2012). The National Institute on Drug Abuse within the National Institute of Health recently provided funding for such a longitudinal study to take place. Weisburd and colleagues were awarded over $3 million to undertake a 5-year study of how living in drug or violent crime hot spots influences personal health, mental health, HIV and sexually transmitted disease rates, safe sex practices, drug use, crime, and other antisocial behaviors. The study will also develop knowledge on why places become drug or violent crime hot spots and how characteristics of street segments and their residents impact upon developmental trends of health, drug use, and crime. Results from this study should provide exciting new insights into the criminology of place.

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