Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis

Richard Wortley, Michael Townsley, Richard Wortley, Michael Townsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317487098
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Environmental criminology is a term that encompasses a range of overlapping perspectives. At its core, the many strands of environmental criminology are bound by a common focus on the role that the immediate environment plays in the performance of crime, and a conviction that careful analyses of these environmental influences are the key to the effective investigation, control, and prevention of crime.

This new edition brings together leading theorists and practitioners in the field to provide a comprehensive, integrative coverage of the field of environmental criminology and crime analysis. This book is divided into three sequential parts:

• Understanding the crime event explores routine activity approach, crime pattern theory, the rational choice perspective, and situational precipitators of crime. • Analysing crime patterns discusses crime mapping, offender mobility, repeat victimisation, geographic profiling, and crime scripts. • Preventing and controlling crime covers topics including problem oriented policing, situational crime prevention, and environmental design.

Fully updated and including new chapters on crime scripts and offender mobility, a scene-setting introductory overview, and critical thinking questions at the end of each chapter, this text is an essential and comprehensive resource for practitioners and students taking courses on environmental criminology, crime analysis, and crime prevention.

1 Environmental criminology and crime analysis

Situating the theory, analytic approach and application

Richard Wortley and Michael Townsley

Introduction

Environmental criminology is a family of theories that share a common interest in criminal events and the immediate circumstances in which they occur. According to Brantingham and Brantingham (1991, p. 2), ‘environmental criminology argues that criminal events must be understood as confluences of offenders, victims or criminal targets and laws in specific settings at particular times and places’. Environmental criminologists look for crime patterns and seek to explain them in terms of environmental influences. From these explanations they derive rules that enable predictions to be made about emerging crime problems and that ultimately inform the development of strategies that might be employed to prevent crime.

Crime analysis is an investigative tool, defined as ‘the set of systematic, analytical processes that provide timely, pertinent information about crime patterns and crime-trend correlations’ (Emig et al., 1980). It uses crime data and police reports to study crime problems, including the characteristics of crime scenes, offenders and victims. Crime patterns are analysed in terms of their socio-demographic, temporal and spatial qualities and may be represented visually using graphs, tables and maps. Using these findings, crime analysts provide tactical advice to police on criminal investigations, deployment of resources, planning, evaluation and crime prevention.

Where the job of the crime analyst is to describe and interpret crime patterns, the job of the environmental criminologist is to develop a theoretical understanding of them. These two tasks are highly interdependent and each informs the other. On the one hand, crime analysts provide the facts that are the focus of environmental criminology and which are needed by environmental criminologists to develop and test their theories. On the other hand, environmental criminology is increasingly used by crime analysts to guide them in the questions they ask of crime data and in the interpretations that they place on their findings. Together, environmental criminology and crime analysis (ECCA) comprises efforts to use knowledge about the relationship between crime and the immediate environment in order to do something about crime problems.

The concerns of ECCA contrast sharply with those of most other criminological approaches. Traditional criminological theories are primarily concerned with criminality. They seek to explain how biological factors, developmental experiences and/or social forces create the criminal offender. In this, they take an historical perspective, focussing on the distant causes of crime. The occurrence of crime is understood largely as an expression of the offender’s acquired deviance, which may be a function of events that occurred many years beforehand. Once the criminal has been created, crime is seen as more or less inevitable: the exact location and timing of the criminal act is of little interest. The prevention of crime is viewed in terms of changing offenders’ fundamental criminality through enriching their childhoods, removing social disadvantage and – once they have offended – providing them with rehabilitation programmes.

ECCA takes a very different view. Here crime is the object of interest. The offender is just one element of a criminal event and how offenders come to be the way they are is of little immediate relevance. Instead, the focus is on the current dynamics of crime – where did it happen, when did it happen, who was involved, what did they do, why did they do it and how did they go about it? The aim of the ECCA is to prevent crime, not to cure offenders or reform society.

ECCA is based on three contingent propositions:

1. 1 Criminal behaviour is significantly influenced by the nature of the immediate environment in which it occurs. The environmental perspective depends upon the principle that all behaviour results from a person–situation interaction. The immediate environment is not just a passive backdrop for criminal behaviour, but rather it plays a fundamental role in initiating the crime and shaping its course. Thus, crime events result not only from criminogenic individuals; they are equally caused by criminogenic elements of the crime scene. Environmental criminology explains how immediate environments affect behaviour and why some environments are criminogenic.
2. 2 The distribution of crime in time and space is non-random. Because criminal behaviour is dependent upon situational factors, crime is patterned according to the location of criminogenic environments. Crime will be concentrated around crime opportunities and other environmental features that facilitate criminal activity. Crime rates vary from suburb to suburb and from street to street and may peak at different times of the day, different days of the week and different weeks of the year. The purpose of crime analysis is to identify and describe these crime patterns.
3. 3 Understanding the role of criminogenic environments and being aware of the way that crime is patterned are powerful weapons in the investigation, control and prevention of crime. This knowledge allows police, crime prevention practitioners and other interested groups to concentrate resources on particular crime problems in particular locations. Changing the criminogenic aspects of targeted environments can reduce the incidence of crime in that location. Environmental criminology and crime analysis combine to provide practical solutions to crime problems.

Across these three domains of theory, analysis and practice, ECCA is multi-disciplinary in its foundations, empirical in its methods and utilitarian in its mission. ECCA draws on the ideas and expertise of sociologists, psychologists, geographers, architects, town planners, industrial designers, computer scientists, demographers, political scientists and economists. It embraces measurement and the scientific method and it is committed to building theories and providing advice that are based on rigorous analysis of the available data. Finally, environmental criminologists and crime analysts actively engage with law enforcement personnel and crime prevention practitioners to help reduce crime.

The purpose of the current volume is to bring together the key components of ECCA and, in doing so, to comprehensively map the field. Despite the apparently unifying definitions and attributes outlined above, the environmental perspective encompasses a varied collection of approaches. Beneath a shared concern with crime patterns and the environment are differing levels of analyses, methods of enquiry and explanatory models. In this chapter, we unpack the historical roots of ECCA and outline the key concepts that have emerged within the field. In the process, we demonstrate our logic for showcasing the work of leading theorists and researchers in ECCA. We begin with an analysis of the early influences on the environmental perspective on crime. We then describe the chronology of work that has shaped our contemporary understanding of ECCA. We conclude with a synopsis of the chapters of this edited volume, emphasising the links between them in order to present ECCA as a unified field of study.

Historical roots of the environmental perspective

The contemporary array of approaches in ECCA reflects the diverse roots from which the perspective has sprung. The influences have come down through different disciplines that in turn have viewed the relationship between crime and the environment through an analytic lens set at different levels of magnification. Brantingham and Brantingham (1991) identified three levels of analysis in the environmental perspective – macro, meso and micro – and it is useful to trace the foundations of the field in terms of these categories.

Macro-analytic roots

Macro analysis ‘involves studies of distribution of crime between countries, between states or provinces or cities within a particular country, or between the counties or cities within a state’ (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1991, p. 21). Analysis at this highly aggregated level constituted the earliest way of conceptualising environmental influences on crime and indeed, studies of this sort represented some of the first ‘scientific’ criminological research.

Pioneering this line of research in the late 1820s Andre-Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet independently conducted detailed analyses of French crime statistics (see Beirne, 1993). From this research came the first recognisable examples of crime maps, depicting crime rates for the provinces of France. The maps were shaded to reflect various socio-demographic features such as poverty and education levels. Guerry and Quetelet both found that crime was not evenly distributed across the country and further, that the distribution varied according to the crime in question. Contrary to expectations, violent crime was highest in poorer rural areas, while property crime was highest in wealthy, industrialised areas. From this they reasoned that poverty did not cause property crime, but rather, opportunity did. Wealthy provinces had more to steal. Their observation about the role of opportunity has remained a central principle of environmental criminology through to the modern era. Likewise, the use of maps to represent crime trends has become the standard technique of crime analysis.

Similar studies in other countries soon followed, as did comparisons between countries (see Brantingham and Brantingham, 1991). For example, research in England in the late nineteenth century found wide differences in crime rates across counties, again with higher rates reported for urban and industrialised areas than for rural areas. Macro-level analysis of crime trends continued into the twentieth century. In the US, significant and stable differences in crime rates and patterns were found among cities and states. However, there are limits to what such aggregated data can show. Inevitably, as we will see in the following sections, there was trend towards analysis at higher levels of resolution.

Meso-analytic roots

Meso analysis ‘involves the study of crime within the sub-areas of a city or metropolis’ (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1991, p. 21). These areas represent intermediate levels of spatial aggregation and may range from suburbs and police districts down to individual streets and addresses. We present two early contributions to the meso-level analysis of crime and the environment, that of the Chicago School and the writings of Jane Jacobs.

The Chicago School pioneered the human ecology movement in sociology and criminology. Ecology is a branch of biology that examines the intricate balance achieved by plant and animal life within their natural habitat. The basic premise of ecology – that individual organisms must be studied as part of a complicated whole – was adopted by a group of sociologists at Chicago University and applied to the study of human behaviour. Members of this group included Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. In particular, this group is noted for its research on migration trends within urban communities and the effects on criminal activity and other forms of social disorder. In this research, the city was conceptualised as a super-organism comprising a collection of sub-communities based around ethnic background, socio-economic class, occupation and so on. Members within these sub-communities were bound together by symbiotic relationships and the sub-communities in turn were in symbiotic relation with one another (Park, 1952). However, ecological equilibrium is subject to change. In the natural world, a new plant may invade and dominate an area until it becomes the successor species. A similar pattern occurs in cities. Burgess (1928) proposed that the city could be divided into five concentric rings or zones. At the centre, Zone I, was the business district; around this was Zone II, where the poorest citizens lived in old, run-down houses; then came Zone III, where workers lived in modest houses; there was another step up the social ladder in Zone IV; and finally, Zone V comprised satellite suburbs from where relatively affluent commuters travelled. With population growth, there is a natural process of invasion, domination and succession as citizens migrate from inner to outer zones.

During the 1930s Shaw and McKay built on these observations to investigate the relationship between neighbourhoods and delinquency (see Shaw and McKay, 1969). They found that delinquency was greatest in Zone II. The neighbourhoods in Zone II contain the poorest citizens, have the least effective social and economic support systems and offer the most criminal opportunities. In addition, these neighbourhoods are subject to two kinds of invasion. First, because they are adjacent to the industrial and commercial centre, they are put under pressure as the central area expands and fewer buildings are available to live in. Second, because Zone II has the cheapest housing, new immigrants are drawn to it. The influx of immigrants, many with adjustment problems associated with their immigrant status, increases the social disorganisation of the neighbourhood through cultural transmission. However, as residents of Zone II become more financially secure and make their gradual journey to outer zones, they do not take their delinquency with them. That is, the lesson for the environmental perspective is that the social problems exhibited in Zone II are features of the neighbourhood conditions rather than inherent features of the individuals who reside there.

The second significant influence on the environmental perspective at the meso level was the work of Jane Jacobs. Jacobs was a journalist and activist, not an academic. Indeed, she did not have a college degree or any formal training in the topics on which she wrote. Nevertheless she set out a number of important ideas that have become absorbed into environmental criminology, while even those ideas that challenge current assumptions in environmental criminology have been the catalyst for debate and research. Like members of the Chicago School, she was interested in cityscapes and the built environment, but at a more local, street level. Moreover, her work contained clear prescriptions for reducing crime. She took particular aim at the urban renewal projects that became endemic in post-war America and elsewhere. In 1961 she published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in which she argued that many of the orthodox indices of poor city planning – the intermingling of industrial, commercial and residential areas; the division of neighbourhoods into small city blocks divided by a criss-cross of streets; the presence of aging buildings; and the reliance on high density living with the corresponding absence of open, green spaces – did not actually predict social disorganisation. Using the North End district of Boston as an example, she demonstrated that an area regarded by many as a slum could in fact be well-maintained, vibrant and relatively crime free. Despite breaking the accepted rules of good urban design – or more accurately, because these rules were broken – the environment of North End created opportunities for residents to interact and to develop mutual support systems. Based on these observations, Jacobs proposed a radical rethink of urban design principles.

Crime occurs, Jacobs argued, when residents feel isolated and anonymous and believe that they have no stake in their neighbourhood. What mattered, therefore, were planning policies that helped bring people together and to foster a sense of community. Jacobs set out four conditions of urban design to put these principles into practice. First, the district should cater to a multitude of purposes. The inclusion of commercial, industrial and recreational activities in residential areas means that streets and parks are in constant use and residents can interact with each other at all times of the day. Second, districts should be divided into small blocks with frequent corners and inter-connecting streets that permit residents to readily access all areas. Such a configuration creates permeability, unifying the district and ensuring that there are no deserted backstreets and other dead zones. Third, there should be a mixture of new and older buildings to ensure a diversity of enterprises that the district can support. While banks, chain stores and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface to the second edition
• 1 Environmental criminology and crime analysis: situating the theory, analytic approach and application
• Part I Understanding the crime event
• Part II Analysing crime patterns
• Part III Preventing and controlling crime
• Index