The Geography of Crime (RLE Social & Cultural Geography)

David Evans, David Herbert

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415731546
• eBook ISBN: 9781317907305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book presents original research into contemporary geographical aspects of the study of crime. The contributors, drawn from different disciplines within the social sciences and from various countries, give a review of the subject which provides a valuable insight into the geography of crime. Their approaches range from the behavioural to the environmental, and the crimes dealt with include violent crime and residential burglary. The book examines data sources, discusses different crimes and ways of studying them and considers the fear of crime. The criminal justice system in the UK is examined in detail, including policy, the operations of community and police committees and an account of the experience of crime prevention policies in Britain and North America is also given.

Chapter One

CRIME AND PLACE: AN INTRODUCTION

David T. Herbert

This is in many ways a timely book. The geography of crime has come of age in the 1980s and both the quickening of pace in terms of research and the willingness to move into new kinds of topical areas reflect this. There is now a range of content it would not have been possible to depict a decade ago and also a blurring of the boundaries between kinds of analyses conducted by geographers and those which are typical of criminology as a whole. A ‘geography’ of crime will always carry its particular hallmarks of an interest in spatial structures, in environmental associations, and in the special qualities of place, but any tendency which might have existed for spatial chauvinism is now far less evident than it might have been in the past.

Geographers studying crime have always recognized some early roots in the kinds of cartographic criminology which appeared during the nineteenth century as magistrates, government statisticians, and others demonstrated the fact that patterns of crime were unevenly spread across cities and regions. Again, the social ecology of the Chicago school which was so influential in the inter-war period contained basic statements on the occurrence of crime or delinquency areas within the city which have had lasting methodological effects. A modern geography of crime inherits these traditions in a critical way but also moves towards a wider range of concerns and to quite different methodological and conceptual positions. The purpose of this introduction is to sketch the broad areas of current concern and to identify the kind of research agenda which faces geographers concerned with the study of crime. These objectives will be achieved both by some initial comments on the relationship between crime and place and also by introducing in a systematic way the contributions which make up this text.

Traditional concerns

The term ‘traditional’ is taken to include the twin, interrelated traditions of cartographic criminology and spatial ecology. The earlier ‘geographies’ of crime were cast in this tradition with a focus on regional variations in different types of crime and of justice. Other studies focused on crime in the city and explored ways of defining crime or delinquency areas and relating these to a range of social indicators of the urban condition. The theories acknowledged and to a lesser extent used in these early studies were those of the social sciences at large. Social disorganization and delinquent sub-culture, for example, were attractive because they could be stated in ‘area’ form, that is they were typical of some kinds of urban neighbourhoods. Interestingly, when The Urban Criminal was published as one of the major empirical studies of the 1970s (Baldwin and Bottoms 1976) it turned towards these theories, especially social disorganization, as a source of understanding. This serves to indicate that traditional concerns are by no means unworthy of continuing research and development. Again, The Urban Criminal was written by criminologists not geographers and has offered a useful bridge to the wider field of study.

The mapping and recording of crime is of continuing value to geographers; as the basic tools and methods of cartographic representation improve so will geographers of crime be better placed to use these in their own research. A first step towards employing these new technologies and, for example, using computer graphics in relation to crime statistics will be a more systematic way of coding such data to a geographic or area reference system. Pyle (1974) proposed a way of forming data recording systems for crime such that they would allow rapid and easy representation in spatial form; the technology and the awareness clearly exist; all that is needed is the implementation. As the computerization of police records progresses it is imperative that it tackles the issue of spatial coding and of proper maintenance of data to allow pattern analysis over time and space.

Crime and place

The concept of place has special meaning in geography which dates most explicitly from the work of French geographers such as Vidal de la Blache (1913) who argued that geography was the science of places rather than of men. Place became somewhat submerged in the 1960s with the focus on locational analysis which was more concerned with the geometry of space than with the meanings of place. The emergence of humanistic geography promises a new era with its belief that place has to be much more than position in space, rather a territory to which people attach values. As Relph (1976: 141) argues:

Places in these terms are fusions of human and natural orders and are significant centres of our immediate experience of the world. They are defined less by unique locations than by the focusing of experiences and intentions on to particular settings.

Places can thus be seen as subjective and qualitative concepts, underpinned by ideas such as sense of belonging, shared values and images, and common concerns. There are many ways to view and to use the concept of place but geographers concerned with crime should perhaps give some increasing emphasis to place in terms of this kind. As geographers identify clusters of crime and regard them as ‘delinquency areas’, the task is then to understand the ways in which such ‘places’ have emerged and the characters which they have assumed. Social ecology still provides some kind of framework for this type of approach and the key here is to draw more heavily on that part of its inheritance which relates to its rich ‘humanistic’, ethnographic tradition rather than to the more mechanical aspects of ecological association. There are examples in the literature of the geography of crime which show how ideas of place can be used in these ways.

Herbert (1976) provides one such example in relation to the persistence of delinquency areas in Cardiff from which young offenders seemed to be drawn in disproportionate numbers. The research strategy allowed residential areas to be classified according to a series of objective indicators and then to identify situations in which objectively similar places were different in terms of the incidence of offenders. Evidence here pointed to the fact that there were differences in values, attitudes, and related forms of behaviour which closely mirrored the levels of delinquency. The places were different subjective environments and these differences held significance for the existence of crime. Places may also differ in terms of levels of vulnerability to crime, some seem to attract offenders much more than others. Herbert and Hyde (1985) identified a number of areas which suffered from residential burglary in Swansea and showed that place differences could underlie such vulnerability. Testing a number of area hypotheses, they were able to show that rates of burglary could be understood in these terms.

Another thrust towards giving place a more central position in the study of crime was provided by Brantingham and Brantingham (1981) in their exposition on ‘environmental criminology’. They argued that any crime consists of the four dimensions of the law, the offender, the target, and the place. All of these have essentially to be integrated into any overall understanding of crime but each is capable of focused study in its own right. Environmental criminology is the study of place, the fourth dimension, which is defined as the discrete location in time and space at which the other three dimensions intersect and a criminal event occurs. The scale of place is that of neighbourhood or local community within the city; the focal interest of environmental criminology is the offence rather than the offender and the characteristics of place are central to an understanding of why a specific event occurs. Environmental criminology provides a useful framework for geographers and a link with the wider field of study. A further, closely connected focus on place can be found in the development of situational crime research with which crime-prevention policies have become increasingly associated. When criminologists talk about the settings or situations in which crimes occur and the opportunities which some environments offer to offenders, they are essentially seeking to define places in ways familiar to geographers. Attempts to codify those features of situations in which criminal events occur are in effect attempts to measure aspects of place; crime-prevention policies which aim at situational change to reduce vulnerability are in effect trying to modify place. This type of approach has a direct line to defensible space ideas and their beliefs that crime can be tackled at a local level.

This place theme can also be related to some of the more recent topical areas within the geography of crime. Over a decade ago now, David Ley (1974) argued that stress areas could be identified in parts of the inner city where normal patterns of behaviour could be adversely affected and constrained by the fact that people felt unsafe. During the 1980s an awareness of the significance of fear of crime has gained force and researchers have begun to examine the concept of place in this context. Fear undoubtedly affects some groups and individuals more than others but it is also evident that there are place problems as well as people problems. If there are areas emerging in our cities where people are afraid to go out at night or where residents feel they cannot leave their property unprotected then these are places to be studied and understood.

Other trends and a research agenda

The place focus offers one strong theme for the future development of a geography of crime but there are others. Spatial behaviour and behaviour in space offer themes well understood in some areas of geographical research but not at all well explored in the context of crime. The theme of journey to crime has been studied and a number of generalizations are available on typical distances travelled by different types of offenders, etc. Behavioural characteristics of known offenders have been studied but this research has concentrated on the ‘professional’ type of offender being held at some place of custody; much less is known about the opportunist offender towards whom many of the present crime-prevention initiatives are being aimed. Some of the early work on offenders' images of the city needs replication in behavioural research. Again, a focus in behavioural studies on the offenders should be balanced by a greater emphasis on the victims and potential victims whose behaviour in space can be highly significant. Behavioural studies have some way to go in the geography of crime. There is much to be done in relation to offenders and offences, new initiatives to be taken in the study of victims and a greater understanding to be reached on the ways in which fear of crime affects people's lives.

Geographers have begun to show much more explicit interest in the criminal justice system as a research theme. One of the qualities of this collection of essays is that it does offer several strong examples of ways in which this shift of interest is being accomplished. The markers have been down for some time. Geographers have noted the variability within the criminal justice system and the ways in which sentencing patterns, for example, vary considerably among courts in different parts of the country. There is also an awareness of the definitional problems associated with crime statistics affecting both their production and the ways in which they are used. The shifts within criminology from positive science to the sociology of deviance and the radical criminology of the 1970s have been well noted. Of more direct interest to the crime and place theme was the kind of message contained in Shumsky and Stringer's study (1981) of vice areas in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Their basic contention was that the places at which vice was practised were fashioned more by the political wills of the city fathers and the ways in which these were interpreted by the police rather than by the ‘actors’ themselves. Places associated with vice emerged and disappeared, concentrated or dispersed in response to the workings of the criminal justice system. This interest in the impact of the criminal justice system upon crime has been extended in other ways and with other questions. How do policing policies affect crime within the city? If policing intensifies do crime rates fall or do they rise because recording of crime intrudes into the ‘dark area’? How do the police and the courts use their discretionary powers and how are these reflected in geographical space? Another issue of modern times is that of police accountability. This raises questions of the links between police and local democracy, between police and levels of government. These police roles are subject to legislative changes which have implications for urban communities.

This brief introduction identifies some of the key elements which have begun to typify a geography of crime in the 1980s and which are forming the ingredients for a future research agenda. The geography of crime is widening its conceptual bases to encompass selected aspects of both structuralism and humanism. The former is revealed by the increased interest in the criminal justice system and the latter by the concern with place. In these ways a ‘geography’ of crime begins to resemble more closely the breadth of topical concerns which typify the wider field of criminology. In the chapters which follow some of the elements of this ‘sea-change’ will be evident. Our collection contains elements of the old, examples of the new, and some of the portents for future research in the geography of crime.

Organization and content oi this text

Data have always posed particular problems for research in criminology and the issue recurs at many points in this text as various contributors feel the need to qualify the kinds of insights they can offer into an aspect of the ‘crime problem’. We begin the book therefore with a report upon a relatively recent phenomenon in Britain which will have an increasing significance for the study of crime and the use of criminal statistics. The phenomenon is the national crime survey, available in the United States since 1972 and being used in Britain during the 1980s. As Mike Hough and Helen Lewis show in their chapter, there are several other countries such as Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Eire, which now have crime surveys and the acceptability of the approach in Britain is shown by the fact that there will be three national crime surveys in the 1980s.

These surveys are not perfect by any means but do represent major advances in the gathering of data which gives a far more complete and insightful picture of the incidence of crime and its effects than is afforded by the official criminal statistics. We already, for example, have some more definitive information on reporting rates which range from 9 per cent of thefts (valued less than £26) from cars to 99 per cent for thefts of cars; over all types of crime the reporting rate stands at 38 per cent. As the databank is enhanced by successive national crime surveys, far more reliable estimates of the incidence of different types of crime will be possible together with a better understanding of the so-called ‘dark area’ of offences which occur but never become part of the official record. The British Crime Surveys are being used not merely to enhance basic data but also to ask and answer other types of questions such as the levels of risk and of fear of crime amongst different segments of the population.

These official national crime surveys have been augmented by a number of major local surveys and one of the best known of these is the Islington Crime Survey (Jones, McLean, and Young 1986). Conducted in the London Borough of Islington, which is one of the worst affected areas in Britain, this survey shows that over a twelve-month period a staggering 1 in 2 households could expect to be the victims of some kind of crime and about half of those who experience crime would do so more than once. About 1 in 11 households would be burgled and 1 in 10 of these burglaries would be cleared up with very little chance of goods being recovered. It is not surprising that insurance is expensive and difficult to get for people living in some parts of Islington. Figures on assault were equally dramatic and especially for assaults on women. The overall figure was that 1 in 40 women would be victims of sexual assault over a twelve-month period but that this would rise to 1 in 11 for young, white women and 1 in 6 if they frequently went out in the evenings. Lastly and of interest in terms of some of the contributions which follow in this book, there were significant insights on levels of fear of crime. Over half the women avoided going out after dark and 25 per cent never went out alone at any time. Surveys of this kind add significantly to our understanding of the extent of the crime problem and the impact it has on people's lives; the national crime surveys, augmented by major local surveys, promise to provide far better bases for both academic research and action.

Many geographical studies of crime in the 1980s have continued to focus on the environments in which crimes occur and, to a lesser extent, on the environments from which offenders come. The term ‘environment’ has become more various in its interpretations and it is now more common to distinguish between built and social environments, between objective and subjective, and between resource and physical environments. These differing kinds of environments and the relationship to crime are reflected in several of the contributions. Keith Harries and Stephen Stadler return to one of the oldest themes in human geography, the relationship between climatic variations and human behaviour. They study a form of crime for which American cities have attained some notoriety – violence and criminal assault – and examine its relationship with heat stress in Dallas. Over an eight-month period, some 4,309 aggravated assaults were reported to the Dallas police and analysis showed a positive association between the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Plates
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Crime and Place: an introduction
• 2 Counting crime and analysing risks: the British Crime Survey
• 3 Assault and heat stress: Dallas as a case study
• 4 Micro-environments of violence
• 5 Geographical analyses of residential burglary
• 6 Disposition and situation: two sides of the same crime
• 7 Crime in Poland: trends, regional patterns, and neighbourhood awareness
• 8 Behavioural geography and criminal behaviour
• 9 Burglars' choice of targets
• 10 Social relations, neighbourhood structure, and the fear of crime in Britain
• 11 The geography of social control: clarifying some themes
• 12 Policing and the criminal area
• 13 Contesting consultation: the political geography of police-community consultation in London
• 14 Variations in punishment in England and Wales
• 15 Crime prevention: the British experience
• 16 Crime prevention: the North American experience