America's Safest City

Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia

Simon I. Singer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814770238
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

Winner of the American Society of Criminology 2015 Michael J. Hindelang Book Award for the Most Outstanding Contribution to Research in Criminology Since the mid-1990s, the fast-growing suburb of Amherst, NY has been voted by numerous publications as one of the safest places to live in America. Yet, like many of America’s seemingly idyllic suburbs, Amherst is by no means without crime—especially when it comes to adolescents. In America’s Safest City, noted juvenile justice scholar Simon I. Singer uses the types of delinquency seen in Amherst as a case study illuminating the roots of juvenile offending and deviance in modern society. If we are to understand delinquency, Singer argues, we must understand it not just in impoverished areas, but in affluent ones as well.

Drawing on ethnographic work, interviews with troubled youth, parents and service providers, and extensive surveys of teenage residents in Amherst, the book illustrates how a suburban environment is able to provide its youth with opportunities to avoid frequent delinquencies. Singer compares the most delinquent teens he surveys with the least delinquent, analyzing the circumstances that did or did not lead them to deviance and the ways in which they confront their personal difficulties, societal discontents, and serious troubles. Adolescents, parents, teachers, coaches and officials, he concludes, are able in this suburban setting to recognize teens’ need for ongoing sources of trust, empathy, and identity in a multitude of social settings, allowing them to become what Singer terms ‘relationally modern’ individuals better equipped to deal with the trials and tribulations of modern life. A unique and comprehensive study, America’s Safest City is a major new addition to scholarship on juveniles and crime in America.

Crime, Law and Social Change 's special issue on America's Safest City

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America’s Safest Cities

Amherst, New York’s Boulevard Mall could be located in any car-dependent suburb.

America’s safest city is located on the northeast border of Buffalo, New York. In 1996 Money Magazine published its safest city list and named Amherst, New York, the safest of all American cities.¹ Amherst is still considered relatively safe. Although Money Magazine no longer publishes its safest city list, its initial ranking of cities still receives plenty of circulation on the web and in print. More recently (2010), the list’s current publisher, Congressional Quarterly Press, designated Amherst as the safest of all American cities.² In 2012, Money Magazine produced its list of America’s Best Places to Live, and in that list Amherst ranked number 50 of the top 100 cities with populations of 50,000 or more.³

In assessing safety, Money Magazine relied on the FBI’s index category of crimes—defined as acts of murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, and auto theft.⁴ Non-index offenses such as acts of violence without a weapon or fraud were not included. The magazine initially confined its ranking to municipalities of more than 100,000 residents. Defining a city based exclusively on population size means that many municipalities on Money Magazine’s list are commonly viewed as suburbs, but since their populations have grown rapidly, they have been included as cities. A half a century earlier, the population of Amherst was much smaller, and too few people resided within its borders to qualify for the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) publication of city crime rates.

On the bottom of Money Magazine’s list of safe cities are older, more densely populated cities with large segments of impoverished neighborhoods. The same year that the magazine named Amherst the safest city, it named Newark, New Jersey, America’s most dangerous city. The chances of being the victim of a violent crime or theft is substantially greater in Newark, as well as other impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, with their dilapidated buildings, littered streets, bars, and residents hanging out with little work to occupy their time. The point has been repeated many times: Some cities and neighborhoods are more dangerous than others.

The editors of Money Magazine limited their definition of safety to officially recorded rates of crime, although crime rates are not the only determinants of safety. A city’s safety can be defined by its quality of housing, air, places of labor, and, for the purpose of this book, its educational and recreational programs. These additional indicators of safety are considered quality of life indicators, and I will suggest they make a difference on a city’s crime and delinquency rates. Inner cities with a high proportion of impoverished neighborhoods would score low based on a range of quality of life safety measures. Affluent suburbs throughout the developed world score high because of their good schools, spacious neighborhoods, and well-organized local governments. Few parents would deny the importance of sending their child to a good, well-funded public school in a community that has plenty of before- and after-school activities to choose from. But there are other layers of safety to consider that have made the suburbs popular places to live. For instance, newer houses built to current housing codes provide a higher level of physical safety than older dilapidated housing.

In part, this chapter is about layers of safety as they relate to rates of crime. The notion of a safe place to live is not far removed from the idea that good families, good schools, and good neighborhoods are the best places to raise a child. Not only are good parents necessary to maintain a safe city; so, too, are caring teachers, coaches, and youth-service professionals. In a good community, they enable safety by means of their capacity to regulate. This modern-day regulative component demands civility, expert knowledge, and parents willing to assist in confronting a range of adolescent difficulties. However, regulative safety depends not only on the personal resources of families, but also on the public resources of a city. To regulate is to prevent minor acts of deviance from becoming major ones. It presumes that children and adolescents perform their best when they are raised with knowing adults. To ignore an adolescent’s troubles, such as bullying, depression, or drug use, can produce more serious troubling behavior.

The regulative and relational side of safety cannot easily be separated. If adolescents are frequently assaulted in their neighborhoods or in their homes, trust in others will be shaken. Repeated victimization from an early age can lead to feelings of terrible insecurity in adulthood. A secure environment requires more than minimizing the risk of physical victimization; it also involves conditions that allow individuals to gain enough confidence to move about from one social setting to the next. To face family members, peers, teachers, and others without the fear of being humiliated depends on the existence of a basic level of trust—trust not only in one’s parents and extended family members, but also in teachers, coaches, and a range of professionals. Such trust, which contributes to relational safety, is also crucial to the effectiveness of the regulative controls that are deemed essential to producing low rates of delinquency.

My next point relates to the safety of place. Why not just refer to Amherst as one big safe neighborhood? Neighborhoods are parts of cities. They lack their own government and are generally in closer proximity to one another. But the cities of today are not the cities of an earlier era. Suburban cities are within larger metropolitan areas and often separated from them by natural barriers, highways, or large boulevards. They tend to be less densely populated places, and often far from impoverished sections of an inner city. The middle-class neighborhoods of older cities were in closer proximity to the less affluent ones. Suburban cities tend to lack downtowns, and their residents are less likely to rely on public transportation.

The shape of the suburban city should be considered further. Money Magazine’s image of a city is a more modern one, because it is based exclusively on population size rather than urbanization along with industrialization. The suburban city exists because the economy of developed countries like the United States is post-industrial, thereby allowing more of its residents to live in dispersed places. More rapid forms of transportation and intricate forms of electronic communication have facilitated this shift. To pursue many middle-class and upper-class professions, it is no longer necessary to live close to a manufacturing plant or to commute to a centrally located downtown. The suburban office park has become a newly built place to meet and to work. For many in a post-industrial world, it is more important to own a car and to live in proximity to the nearest airport than to have easy access to a downtown bus or train terminal. In other words, the centrality and density of a city have given way to suburbia’s decentered, more sparsely populated spaces.

This Amherst, New York, office building is part of an office park, and is representative of the newly built businesses in suburban cities.

There is another component to safety embedded in Money Magazine’s list. The safe city is an affluent city. The residents of Amherst have higher income-producing jobs, providing them with the money to purchase spacious houses in both newly built and older suburban subdivisions. There is a sharp contrast between the suburban city of Amherst and the most dangerous city on Money Magazine’s list, Newark, New Jersey. The density and affluence of these two cities should be considered. Although many suburban cities have become substantially wealthier than their older inner cities, there are exceptions. For instance, Manhattan has become increasingly a city for the very rich who can afford multimillion-dollar condos. But the Buffalos and Newarks of America are at the opposite end of the spectrum, and I suggest, more typical of urban America than the zones of inner-city wealth that exist in a few of America’s largest and most desirable cities. Those who can afford to live in affluent suburbs have the good paying jobs and the hard cash to afford not only higher priced houses, but also the high property taxes that support good schools, youth recreational programs, and a juvenile justice system that is slow to label its offending youth as delinquents.

Before proceeding with definitions of safety, cities, and affluence, I consider Money Magazine’s bottom-line indicator of safety—crime rates.

Crime and the Safe City

The authors of Money Magazine’s 1996 safest city list write:

To arrive at our safety rankings, we adjusted the FBI’s 1995 crime statistics for 202 cities with populations of at least 100,000 to give greater emphasis to the crimes you consider to be the most threatening. The safest place of all: Amherst, N.Y., a bucolic suburb of 107,000 residents just outside Buffalo that posted the lowest rates for both overall violent crime and burglary. Indeed, its 79 violent crimes and 201 burglaries per 100,000 residents are 88 percent and 80 percent below the national average, respectively. In Amherst, just one in 1,259 people was a victim of violent crime last year. Amherst ranked fifth safest in the U.S. for auto thefts, as just one in 505 people suffered a car theft in ’95.⁵

In announcing that Amherst, New York, is America’s safest city, Money Magazine focused on the risk of victimization—an issue not far removed from how criminologists think about crime. The magazine’s assessment seems straightforward: the total number of index offenses divided by the total population and multiplied by a constant.

But the validity of that formula should be considered in greater detail. A city’s crime rate consists of more than just its indexed category of offenses; there are also non-indexed offenses to consider. Police-recorded crimes (albeit serious ones) represent only a small proportion of the total amount of actual crime. The reasons for this are related to both the objective and the perceived seriousness of crime. Serious injuries require hospitalization and for medical officials to report the incident to the police. Generally, victims and witnesses wish to see offenders punished for their crimes and are quick to call the police. But others may not wish to involve the police because of the offender’s age, or because they might know them or their parents. Some victims may not wish to see an adolescent arrested, adjudicated as a criminal or delinquent, and possibly sent to a prison or reformatory. In these and other cases, offense seriousness is influenced by familiarity and by a belief that justice is more appropriately served through less formal means. Thus fights between classmates in a public school yard or between sports team members often do not come to the attention of the police. Petty property damage by a neighbor’s adolescent may be settled without calling the police. In other words, offenses can remain unrecorded acts of crime because they are considered too trivial to report or the victims prefer an informal approach.

Particularly relevant are the characteristics of the offender. Age matters for legal as well as practical reasons. Many parents believe that their law-violating youth are deserving of another chance, and should not be convicted of a crime. They support the idea of juvenile justice, especially for their own adolescents. Presumably, parents know their own children better than others’ and are more inclined to see their kids (or kids who look like their own) as more deserving of a second and even third chance. Alternative methods for resolving disputes may be sought through organizational settings that do not officially record offenses, such as school disciplinary committees or youth courts operated by teens under adult supervision. These informal means of administering juvenile justice fall under the rubric of juvenile diversion—a form of justice that is more likely to prevail in the safe city. Safe cities have an advantage in that locally sponsored treatment programs are often facilitated by their youth boards. Youth boards for the prevention and control of delinquency were advocated by President’s Johnson’s 1968 Crime Commission, and have remained in communities that could sustain their funded programs.⁶

Violence and personal theft form a narrow band of index offenses, and one that is made even narrower by Money Magazine’s exclusion of larceny as an index offense—although it is technically an index offense. The justification for this narrow band is its fear of crime—not just any crime but crime resulting in serious injuries or theft. Surveys of the population and harsh legislative penalties for violent index crimes confirm their seriousness.⁷ Still, there is a larger spectrum of non-index crimes that can create considerable harm, such as acts of fraud or the devastating harm that can result from an adolescent’s early addiction to drugs. These non-index offenses are not included in the calculated crime rates leading Money Magazine to rank Amherst as especially safe.

The narrow band of index offenses becomes even tighter when considering that citizen-reporting and police-recording behaviors are often influenced by location. This is especially the case for adolescents. The police make more arrests in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods than in affluent suburban cities. The impoverished inner city has less in the way of the diversionary roads for confronting the illegal conduct of its youth. In the more dangerous cities of America, less official tolerance for offenses produces higher arrests. For instance, in 2011 about 12,000 youth were arrested in New York City for possessing small amounts of marijuana.⁸ The vast majority of these youth were black and Hispanic; about half had never been arrested before. In contrast, few white adolescents are arrested for the possession of pot in safe city suburbs like Amherst.

The editors of Money Magazine are not in the business of elaborating the problems with a safe-city list based on police-recorded crime. That is the task of criminologists who have developed self-report and observational techniques to understand the broader spectrum of recorded as well as unrecorded offenses. How this larger population of offenses is uncovered depends on the types of questions asked and to whom those questions are directed. In surveys of victimization, a general population is asked about their experiences as victims of crime and only a small proportion of those offenses are reported to the police. The more serious the crime, the more likely it is to be reported.

Delinquency Rates

When the focus is on offenders instead of offenses, surveys reveal that offending among both affluent and non-affluent adolescents is quite common. Occasional acts of delinquency rarely result in an arrest and the adjudication of an adolescent in juvenile or criminal court. Apparently, this is not the case for inner-city black youth, whose rates of arrest far exceed those of white suburban youth. The difference between affluent and non-affluent youth would seem obvious based on any visit to a police station, juvenile courtroom, or reformatory. Or, as Travis Hirschi has stated in his highly acclaimed 1969 book, the Causes of Delinquency,⁹ “there is little doubt that the lower-class boy is more likely to end up in a reformatory than to go to college.” But based on his survey data, Hirschi found that parents’ occupational, educational, and welfare status made no significant difference in youth offending rates. Hirschi concluded that “social class differences with respect to self-reported delinquency are very small.”¹⁰ Hirschi attributes the reasons for more lower-class youth ending up in reformatories to their lack of familial, educational, and general societal attachments. Hirschi reports what others have reported before him and continue to report in countless journal articles: The adolescents who end up arrested are more often those detached from the larger society; they do not get along with their parents or they dislike school, frequently because they perform poorly in school and have low verbal scores. Middle-class and upper-class youth are fortunate because they are raised in more verbal households and in public as well as in private schools where their educational needs are most likely met.

Hirschi is not the only distinguished criminologist to consider the nature of the relationship between delinquency and social class. The late twentieth-century delinquency literature includes a few studies of middle-class and upper-clas...