Crime, Policing and Place

Essays in Environmental Criminology

David Evans, Nicholas Fyfe, David Herbert, David Evans, Nicholas Fyfe, David Herbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415049900
• eBook ISBN: 9781134943562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

First published in 2002. Spiralling crime rates and continuing public concern about police-community relations ensure that crime and policing remain firmly on the social and political agenda. An awareness of crime continues to affect the lives of ordinary people and also to stimulate policy makers who recognise that crime rates form one of the principles by which their effectiveness is judged. Of the many agencies involved in the battle against crime, the police in their various roles constitute the most obvious front line.
Drawing on case material from Britain, Europe, Canada and America, Crime, Policing and Place examines the significance of spatial patterns of crime and the processes which produce them. The book analyses the implications of theoretical and methodological innovation in the study of crime and policing, the processes which underlie the uneven distribution and impact of crime and the success of recent policies aimed at preventing crime and enhancing police-community relations.
Contributors are drawn from a variety of academic disciplines, including criminology, geography and social policy and also from the police and government agencies with direct policy input.

Part I

METHODOLOGIES AND SOURCES

1

EXPLANATIONS OF CRIME AND PLACE

Anthony E. Bottoms and Paul Wiles

The opportunity for two criminologists to reflect, in the company of geographers, upon some aspects of the spatial distribution of crime produces something of a dilemma. On the one hand we want to give full weight to and to welcome the very real contributions which geographers have recently made to this subject (e.g. in Britain alone, Davidson 1981; Herbert 1982; Smith 1986); on the other hand, there seems little point in producing yet another substantive overview of what these writers, and their criminological and sociological colleagues, have discovered to date.

We have chosen, therefore, to write largely in a methodological vein, though with reference where appropriate to substantive findings. Our framework of approach is the intimate relationship of social relations and spatial structures found within the theory of ‘structuration’, a framework which has attracted considerable recent attention and critical debate among general human geographers and social theorists (e.g. Gregory and Urry 1985), but which has so far been given little consideration in discussions of the spatial dimensions of crime and offending. We adopt this approach because structuration theory offers a model for explanation which brings together, in a coherent fashion, a number of elements which we have been developing in our own work on residential areas and crime; it offers, in our view, both a framework within which previous research can be synthesized, and a valuable stimulus for future research.

A useful starting-point is to consider some recent contributions to the criminological literature. The years 1989 and 1990 saw the publication of two ambitious books, one Australian, one American, claiming to offer ‘general theories of crime’, that is to say, theories that would explain all or most crime in (at the minimum) western societies (Braithwaite 1989; Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990).¹ This is not an appropriate place to discuss the general merits and demerits of these theories; suffice to say that anyone well versed in the literature of ‘environmental criminology’² would find a remarkable absence of the spatial dimensions of crime and offending in both books. Braithwaite’s ‘theory of reintegrative shaming’ devotes very little attention to crimes as opposed to offenders,³ and even offender rate variations are discussed in a largely aspatial manner. Gottfredson and Hirschi’s theory takes crimes more seriously, but largely from the perspectives of classical theory and simple opportunity theory, and with little explicit discussion of spatial issues (but see pp. 12–13);⁴ in discussing offenders, these authors’ key concept is low social control, and again spatial processes are largely absent from the discussion.

By way of contrast consider an article published in the American journal Criminology in 1989, on the ‘hot spots of predatory crime’ (Sherman et al. 1989). The authors used ‘police call data’⁵ for Minneapolis for 1985–6, and discovered among other things

1 that just 3.3 per cent of addresses and intersections in the city generated 50 per cent of all calls to the police for which cars were dispatched

2 there was great variation in the victimization of specific micro-locations even within high crime areas.

From these data Sherman et al. pose the question (not answerable with the kind of information they had access to):

whether the routine activities of places, given their physical environment, are actually criminogenic. Do places vary in their capacity to help cause crime, or merely in their frequency of hosting crime that was going to occur some place inevitably, regardless of the specific place? Are the routine activities of hot spots criminogenic generators of crime, or merely more attractive receptors of crime? (Sherman et al. 1989:46, italics in original)

The Minneapolis data certainly seem to suggest that a criminological theory without an adequate dimension of place (such as those of Braithwaite or Gottfredson and Hirschi) will be incomplete – unless, of course, one is prepared to argue that the spatial dimension is purely epiphenomenal, which is possible, but seems unlikely (see pp. 17–19). But the questions posed by the authors about their results in turn create some anxieties. In speaking about ‘places [which] cause crime’, are Sherman and his colleagues adopting an over-deterministic approach to the idea of place?⁶ Anxiety is to some extent allayed by the introduction of the concept of ‘routine activities’ (from Cohen and Felson 1979), which clearly introduces an element of social activities, linked in this case to specific locations. But is the concept of ‘routine activities of hot spots’ itself too static and invariant a notion to do justice to the full complexity of the picture – not least since Sherman et al. do not refer to possible differences in police calls by day and time within their hot spot data?

A way to begin to answer these questions would seem to be to carry out observations of social activity in specific ‘hot spots’, observing both person—person interactions and the response of social actors to the physical aspects of location. Additionally, one could interview people who used these locations. Such proposed procedures, however, immediately raise questions about the way in which, as social scientists, we can make adequate sense of the relationship between statistical distributions (such as the Minneapolis ‘hot spots’ analysis) and ethnographic and interview studies of some of the same social phenomena. This is a problem which has bedevilled environmental criminology for a long time, and certainly since the days of the Chicago school. Unless and until it can be overcome, it seems likely that many aspects of place will go on being understated by general criminological writers, as they were by Braithwaite and by Gottfredson and Hirschi.

STATISTICAL DISTRIBUTIONS AND ETHNOGRAPHY: HISTORY AND PROBLEMATIC

The work of the pre-war Chicago researchers has justly remained important because they employed a wide variety of research methods, examining inter alia both the statistical data on offender distributions in the city (Shaw and McKay 1942) and aspects of the ethnography of street life and crime (e.g. Shaw 1930; Cressey 1932). They established that offender residence in Chicago was not randomly distributed across the city but was quite clearly patterned, with the highest offender rate areas located in an inner city zone close to the central business district, and then a diminution of the offender rate as one moved outwards towards the periphery of the city. In order to explain this distribution they utilized a theory of the growth of the city in terms of an historical process of urban development radiating outwards from the city’s core. This theory seemed adequately to explain the distribution of land use they had found in Chicago, although it continued to be a matter of some debate as to how far the theory fitted other cities, and therefore whether it was a general theory. Their theory of urban development did not itself explain why offenders lived in some areas rather than others; however, from their ethnographic work the Chicagoans did develop an explanation of why and how offending occurred, based on the key concept of ‘social disorganization’. Essentially their argument was that offending manifested itself in a lack of structurally located social bonds which encouraged legitimate and discouraged deviant behaviour. Such social disorganization was the result of new immigrant populations coming together and not having had the opportunity to develop a stable social structure with clear norms. Such populations were to be found in those areas of the city, immediately surrounding the inner core, which had been abandoned by more established groups and so offered the cheapest available housing for the new immigrants – the well-known ‘interstitial areas’ of the Chicago theory. The continuing process of immigration into Chicago meant that as immigrant groups developed more stable normative structures they moved out of the interstitial areas to be replaced, in their turn, by new immigrants. So the cycle was repeated, with new groups gradually developing from disorganization to more stable normative structures and at the same time moving their location gradually outward from the city’s centre. In this way areas of the city continued to have patterned offender rates over time.

The Chicago theory of social disorganization has been very influential in the history of criminology. It appears to offer an answer to the problem of the relationship between studies of the areal statistical distribution of crime and offending, and studies of the ethnography of criminal behaviour. As a result much subsequent criminological research used the idea of social disorganization as a central concept. However, there are very real problems with the concept, and beginning with Whyte’s (1943) classic Street Corner Society, it was subjected to a series of critiques. A number of writers pointed out that empirical studies of interstitial areas and/or deviant behaviour did not support the idea that illegal behaviour was always the result of ‘disorganization’ – rather, it might instead be the result of highly organized, but alternative sets of normative values. The fact that action is morally disapproved of does not mean that it is necessarily any less related to social organization (see e.g. Becker 1963). The result, it was argued, was that the theory, like a number of other social theories of crime, was overdeterministic and therefore over-predictive of crime (Matza, 1964). Basically the concept of social disorganization was attacked as being at best a value judgment, and at worst empirically false.

Although the concept of social disorganization has been subject to so much criticism it has nevertheless lived on. For example, recent discussion in the United States has used the notion of an ‘underclass’, whose lack of a normative order is said to be demonstrated by the collapse of the (black) family, to explain the high crime rates of their cities’ ghettos (for a discussion of how these ideas have been used in popular debate see e.g. Chicago Tribune 1986). This renaissance of social disorganization is not entirely surprising since criminology has failed to develop any very satisfactory alternative concept to bridge the two levels of analysis. The alternative has all too often been simply to operate at just one level of analysis. Recent research in Britain has sometimes exemplified this approach. Janet Foster, in a study of crime on housing estates in south London, is most illuminating about the ethnography of crime but says little about the distribution of crime between or within estates (Foster 1990). On the other hand, the analysis of the results of the British Crime Survey examined the distribution of crime across socially different types of areas (using the ACORN classifications) but said little about why these areas have such different crime rates or indeed whether the classification which was used captured socially similar areas within its categories (Mayhew et al. 1989).⁷ Of course, many problems of this kind may simply be due to the limitations of the particular research methods being used within a particular project, and in the end to the lack of the resources available to employ additional or alternative methods. However, the gap remains, and an adequate environmental criminology clearly needs a model of explanation which can link statistical analyses of the distribution of crime with ethnographic studies of criminal and social action.

STRUCTURATION THEORY

In order to explore what might be an adequate explanatory model for environmental criminology, we need first to explore the more general question of what an adequate explanatory model in social science might look like.

Social science has always had a problem with what form explanation ought to take, given that it is concerned with the activity of human beings. The twin dangers are that explanations either operate with models of human action which are so deterministic that they deny any role for human agency, or they are so voluntaristic and particularistic that they deny any real possibility of social science explanations at all. The history of social science could be written in terms of the various attempts to overcome this problem. Social science, like other human activities, has its fashions and at different times fashion has pushed researchers towards one or other of these extremes. The result has been that at different times explanations have been dominated by structural accounts, which have stressed the extent to which human behaviour is a product of the constraints imposed by social structures which are external to the individual (such as the economy), or alternatively by accounts of action, which have emphasized the extent to which human action is a consequence of the creative understanding of particular individuals, and their interaction with other actors. Both approaches have had the advantage of highlighting, often with great clarity, certain aspects of the human condition, but the disadvantage is that they remain partial.

Research in environmental criminology has been prone to just these difficulties. Explanations of where offences occur, or where offenders live, can all too easily assume that place or design acts as a deterministic and monocausal variable. Alternatively, they may assume that place can stand as an operational construct for other aspects of social structure, such as class, or employment status, or family structure; or that it is simply a sorting mechanism which brings together in one place those individuals who possess criminogenie attributes (generally of a genetic or psychological kind). These latter formulations use place as a second order explanation, parasitic on separate explanations of criminal behaviour, which simply accounts for the distribution of crime in geographical space. Alternatively again, structural explanations of this kind may combine the influence of place and the influence of class/employment/family structure, yet remain straightforwardly deterministic. All of these approaches can be criticized as giving insufficient weight to human agency (see for example the work of Sally Merry (1981) on the limitations of a purely design-orientated approach to crime).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I. Methodologies and Sources
• PART II. Crime and Policing: Spatial Patterns and Social Processes
• PART III. Crime and Policing: Policy Perspectives
• Index