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Crime, Geography of
Crime, Geography of David Herbert, Swansea University, Swansea, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The geography of crime has been recognized for a considerable time but has only in relatively recent years moved into a more central position as a significant part of criminology. There is a strong academic strand that has examined concepts such as crime areas and vulnerable areas and has developed theories to account for their existence in cities. These studies have drawn on geographical concepts such as the importance of place and the dynamics of spatial analysis but have also related to established social science benchmarks such as social disorganization and deviant subcultures. Additionally, a strong applied approach has developed that centers around the concept of geographical profiling and the application of techniques and algorithms of geographical information systems (GIS) to crime data.
Crime has its geographies and is a form of behavior that lends itself to the principles and methods of geographical analysis. Interestingly, the initial awareness of geographical crime patterns had a practical element; it was developed as an analysis with the potential for applications to problem solving. This applied aspect has become more and more predominant in recent times with the advent of procedures such as geographical crime profiling (the application of geographical information systems (GIS) techniques to crime data to allow the probable location of offenders to be identified. It can also be used to predict where offenses are most likely to occur) and the continued evolution of the family of techniques known as GIS (method for the collection and analysis of georeferenced data. It is now widely used by police forces in their use of crime statistics). Many government agencies and police forces now use crime mapping in its various forms as a standard tool in the task of criminal investigations. There are also what might be termed more ‘academic’ studies with no necessary practical outcomes but even they have the potential to contribute to the policy debate of understanding crime and criminals. The recognition of crime patterns at a variety of scales can be traced to studies and reports completed in the early part of the nineteenth century. The geography of crime as a modern subdiscipline has moved from these identifications of patterns to their detailed representation, interpretation, and understanding. There are studies of the places where offenders live and the ways in which places that may be described as crime areas (those parts of the city that persistently suffer the most crime and tend to contain disproportionate numbers of offenders) emerge and persist. There are studies of the places that experience most crime and of the conditions that underpin their vulnerability. Different types of crime have different geographies and even the most simple forms of mapping will reveal these differences. Environmental criminology focuses on crime and place and has extended beyond an interest in the designed or built environment into the role of a more holistic concept of place. People experience crime and they also experience fear of crime and possible victimization, both of these affect their images of the environments in which they live. The neighborhood or residential area is one highly relevant environment and others include the places where they work or enjoy leisure and the ‘pathways’ they follow to reach such
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 5
places. If some of the conditions that contribute to the incidence of crime in space, both real and perceived, can be identified, it is a short step to ameliorative policy formation. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field but it does now encompass a geographical perspective. Crime is a form of deviance that involves the infringement of rules or laws that a specific society has created; both the act of a crime and the behavior of the criminal are therefore socially defined and those definitions will vary from one society to another and also over time within one society. A change in the law relating to drug abuse or traffic offenses, for example, will have significant impact on the geography of crime. The geographic study of crime draws a distinction between the geography of offenses, where crimes are committed, and the geography of offenders, where criminals live. As suggested, there are many different geographies of crime. The places where shoplifting, robbery, and residential burglary occur are all different: the teenage mugger is likely to come from a different kind of neighborhood than the corporate lawyer engaged in tax fraud. This diversity has stimulated study of the geography of crime at a variety of scales. Environmental criminology, with its focus on the places at which crimes occur, offers one organizing framework; the problematic concept of the ‘crime area’ offers another.
Origins The origins of the geography of crime are found in early nineteenth century interest in cartographic criminology. A French statistician, Guerry (1833) who was employed in public service, produced maps showing the regional concentrations of crime. His observation that crimes of violence were disproportionately represented in the south of France led him to link criminal behavior and climate. In England, the social reformers such as Mayhew (1861–62) noted the strong clusters of crimes and criminals in specific areas of cities. Mayhew described the ‘rookeries’ of London where children were “born and bred to the business of crime.” The Chicago studies of Shaw and McKay (1942) established a social science-based perspective on crime or delinquency areas, urban spatial patterns, and gradients and a set of ‘theories,’ principally Social Disorganization, that underpinned the ecology of crime in the city. Their studies gave
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a strong impetus to an academic and theoretical analysis that had practical implications but also conceptual links to the evolving theories of the contemporary Chicago School of Social Ecology. The basic premises were that crime had a spatial order; it was not distributed randomly but showed strong and persistent trends to cluster in poorer, disadvantaged environments. Clifford Shaw moved from this analysis to found the Chicago Area Project aimed at helping youths in disadvantaged neighborhoods and this work has continued to the present day. Subsequent studies have shown a remarkable persistence of these basic qualities of a geography of crime and, further, have also demonstrated that spatial order, clustering, and a link with ‘place’ typify related aspects of the criminal justice system such as sentencing patterns. Policing policies and practices are other areas where these characteristics are evident and worthy of detailed study.
Information Bases The geography of crime shares with criminology in general the problematic nature of the available data. Official crime statistics are suspect because the police record a relatively small minority of offenses that actually occur and apprehend an even smaller number of criminals. Approximately 80% of offenses never enter police records. This ‘dark area’ varies by type of offense. It is very high for offenses such as shoplifting or vandalism and low for car theft or homicide and arises from the unwillingness of the public, as victims or observers, to report crime to the police. Reasons for underreporting range from embarrassment to fear of reprisal to apathy. Police themselves actually observe few criminal events and therefore rely on the public, broadly defined, to notify them when offenses occur. Even the remaining 20% is further diminished by offenses not proceeded with. This underrecording of crime may mean that official data contains biases and deficiencies. Does it overrecord offenses by disadvantaged youths? Does it underrecord whitecollar crime? Official crime statistics may reveal more about those who define criminality and administer the criminal justice system than about the actual incidence and seriousness of crime. The official ‘antidote’ to these concerns about criminal statistics has been the introduction of national crime surveys. Dating in the main from the 1980s, these build upon an older ad hoc tradition of self-report studies and take the form of sample surveys of victimization experience and related attitudes toward crime, justice, law, and order. National crime surveys have confirmed underrecording and have qualified statements on rising crime rates, which may reflect differential recording practice rather than actual changes in crime. They have also augmented our knowledge of topics such as fear of crime. Whereas national crime surveys have not remedied the deficiencies of official criminal statistics, they have allowed for their interpretation in more refined and constructive ways. For geographers, official statistics and national crime surveys are useful for studies of national, regional, and local patterns of criminal activity and the quality of these databases are now well understood. There is continuing interest in identifying new historical data sources. The Bodleian Library at Oxford has a project to digitize records on crimes, murders, executions, and
transportations in nineteenth-century England from the John Johnson Collection and provides links both to the Old Bailey proceedings web site and to sources at Harvard and Austin, Texas, in the United States.
Theoretical Bases The geography of crime draws upon the generic theories of criminology and social science and its own disciplinary concepts. Criminology has nurtured many theories and a significant lack of consensus. Most embrace a ‘multifactor’ explanation, which, despite its diffuseness, is probably correct. There is no single causal explanation for criminality but a ‘package’ of interrelated conditions of varying applicability. Structural theories see criminal behavior as the inevitable outcome of societies that create inequalities. Yet these macrotheories fail to account for the fact that some individuals who suffer from inequality will react criminally, whereas others will not. Geographers have favored those criminological theories that lend themselves to analyses that allow a focus on place. Social disorganization is one such theory. Originating in the Chicago studies of the 1920s and 1930s, this theory linked crime with areas that lacked social order, established values, leaders, and social networks. Comparisons were made with residential areas that did possess these qualities, were ‘socially organized,’ and experienced low rates of crime. Subcultural theory, proposing that crime may be prevalent because it is part of the normal behavior pattern within specific groups, can be found in embryo form in Mayhew’s study of London’s rookeries. Although now argued most consistently in relation to social groups, subcultural theory can be articulated in terms of areas or neighborhoods. Social control theory shares common strands with social disorganization and subculture, emphasizing the positive impacts of social control mechanisms in reducing the incidence of criminal behavior. The mechanism may be good parental supervision, an effective school or teacher, or the effects of voluntary organizations or community groups. It is again a theory that can be adapted to a focus on place and has a central concern with the offenders and where they live. Environmental criminology offers the closest approximation to a geographical ‘theory’ of crime. It emphasizes the criminal act and the location at which it occurs, the ‘where’ rather than the ‘why’ of crime (Bottoms, 1994). Place is central to an approach that acknowledges that each offense leaves a new point on the map and is a clue to the activity space of the offender. The approach draws in considerations of the routine spatial activities of offenders and victims, the concept of journey to crime, and related ideas of territoriality and surveillance. At the present time environmental criminology is more a methodology than a theory. As such it draws heavily on basic geographical concepts such as space and place, and lends itself to detailed spatial analysis through GIS. Conceptual issues include the problem of attaching any independent significance to space and understanding the full range of meanings attached to place, though these are issues that are generic to the study of human geography and are by no means specific to the geography of crime.
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Approaches to the Geography of Crime Studies that merit the description of a geography of crime have changed along with broader paradigm shifts within the social sciences. Cartographic criminology, basically concerned with the mapping of criminal statistics and the representation of spatial patterns, has evolved to reflect wider use of statistical methods including the sophisticated technology of GIS and will be discussed more fully in the next section. The study of crime areas was an early focus for a geography of crime, arising from the persistent evidence that the mapping of both offenders and offenses revealed concentrations or clusters in space and indeed in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This evidence was apparent at a variety of geographical scales from regions to localities within cities but the most significant work arose from Shaw and McKay’s studies of delinquency and crime areas in Chicago. There is persistent evidence for ‘crime areas’ and a simple exercise of mapping crime statistics makes this clear. Although crime areas can be identified in a reasonably clear way, the task of explaining their existence is less straightforward. Statistical analyses reveal strong correlations between the incidence of criminal residence and indicators of a poor residential environment. Measures such as high unemployment rate, low income, substandard housing, and low educational attainment recur and, less frequently, indicators such as lone-parent families and broken homes. Correlates of this kind have been interpreted as indicative of some more general condition such as social disorganization or weak social control, and particular significance is often attached to single measures such as high unemployment. For the most part, however, the results of this type of analysis remain descriptive; they have value in identifying groups and areas from which offenders are likely to come but are in effect markers of some more general social condition as is the crime rate itself. Statistical analyses have also been used as a first stage in the study of crime or delinquency areas. After identifying clusters of offenders and the conditions under which they live, the research task then is to probe more deeply with different research methodologies into the nature of the ‘crime area.’ One approach has identified particular neighborhood characteristics that might predispose residents to criminology. Herbert (1976) compared ‘crime’ and ‘non-crime’ (or at least much less crime) areas in a city, controlling for sociodemographic profiles, and found a consistent difference in terms of sets of values and forms of behavior between the two types of area. In the ‘crime’ areas, parents adopted different approaches to control, had a clear tendency to accept some forms of misbehavior, and the children were lower achievers educationally. Other studies have examined this ‘neighborhood effect’ and the extent to which an individual’s residential area has influence on criminal activity. The Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime was a longitudinal study of the pathways into and out of offending for a cohort of 4328 children who started secondary school in the City of Edinburgh in 1998. One finding was that the characteristics of neighborhoods did play a role, albeit weaker than individual traits such as gender and personality, in influencing their delinquent and drug-taking behavior (McVie and Norris, 2006a).
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Delinquency and hard drug use were influenced by negative conditions such as high levels of deprivation. Another finding was that neighborhood effects were strongest in the earlier years of the cohort at around the age of 12 and became less significant as they became older (McVie and Norris, 2006b). Factors such as low social control and less social organization seemed relevant. Other neighborhood studies have focused on specific issues such as lack of parental supervision. More recently, what might be termed ‘crime area’ studies have taken a known problem area and sought to unravel both its origins and present form. In the United Kingdom, the so-called ‘problem housing estates’ lend themselves to this kind of analysis. Such estates often originated as local housing managers ‘dumped’ known problem families or relocated a slum clearance population to a specific estate. Early episodes of misbehavior reinforced labeling and reputations that have persisted. The Meadowell Study (Barke and Turnbull, 1992), based on an estate of around 2000 homes, demonstrated a lifestyle that was permeated by welfare dependency, drug-trading, petty crime, and vandalism. Often self-selection of tenants who opt for this kind of lifestyle builds the area profile. In late 1991, there were major riots and these events acted as a catalyst for change. Issues such as quality of housing, jobs, and local facilities were addressed with major changes to the physical environment. By mid-2000, significant improvements were being reported and Meadowell was being described as a wellcared for and thriving community (BBC, 2012). Crime areas change over time and as this example shows, they can be recovered by determined social intervention. There is also evidence that they are cyclical in the sense they are worse at specific points of local demographic change. The concept of a ‘community career’ suggests that some localities move through a form of life cycle with highs and lows of criminal activity (Bottoms et al., 1992). The impact of deprivation is far from removed from the concept of crime areas. Sections of urban populations are still being disenfranchised from the rest of society and the notion of a section of society that can be described as the ‘truly disadvantaged’ and the wider idea of an urban underclass exemplify this. Understanding why criminal events occur where they do require different approaches. Criminals respond to opportunities or targets in the environment and the task is to identify these ‘cues.’ A large majority of such crimes are opportunist and involve minimal planning; a minority is ‘professional,’ involving experienced criminals who may spend significant amounts of time preparing for a single criminal event. It is the former that lends itself to analyses based on opportunism and environmental cues. What makes some areas or residential units more vulnerable to crime? First, areas that offer more obvious or lucrative targets for a crime such as burglary are often not likely to experience most offenses. In part this is a function of security, wealthier neighborhoods are able to defend themselves with security devices and forms of control such as block or neighborhood watch and gated communities. Research also shows that burglars tend not to travel far to commit an offense (Herbert and Hyde, 1985). The offender– residence hypothesis suggests that vulnerable areas are either the areas or are close to areas where offenders live.
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Neighborhoods have ‘cores’ and ‘borders’ and the border-zone hypothesis suggests that the borders are more vulnerable. The local social control hypothesis suggests that ordered, wellorganized neighborhoods with a strong sense of community identity experience less crime; the area variability hypothesis suggests that ‘mixed’ areas experience more. Hypotheses of these kinds, focusing on the places at which criminal events occur, blend into the general approach of environmental criminology. So too do studies of incivilities or signs of disorder in the urban environment (Herbert, 1993) and the idea that these may indicate a deteriorating situation in neighborhoods. The well-known study of ‘broken windows’ (Wilson and Kelling, 1982) instigated this line of thinking. Allied to the idea of vulnerable areas that suffer disproportionately from crime are studies of the movements of offenders, sometimes referred to as journeys to crime. There is ample evidence that the majority of offenders do not travel great distances to commit crimes and this is especially true of youths and opportunistic offending. Known areas are the favorite targets and these often correspond with the places and routes offenders travel in their normal everyday lives. For the small minority of professional criminals, the ranges can be much greater and involve planning and observation. As criminals react to cues in the environment so do potential victims. Fear of crime arises from the perception that parts of the city, types of individuals or groups, and times of the day are dangerous and there is evidence for a steady increase in public anxiety about crime and safety (Smith, 2010). People will modify their behavior to cope with fear and to achieve feelings of community safety. Early studies identified residents’ perceived stress areas and showed that these were avoided in everyday routines. Fear of crime is known to be high among old people and women with young children. Victimization experience and fear are linked to deprived areas but also to the routine forms of some urban lifestyles and specific demographic groups. Groups such as the elderly in fact experience less crime than youths but tend to adopt more comprehensive avoidance strategies to reduce risk. More broadly, studies of perceived ‘dangerous places’ suggest that feelings of fear are dynamic and contextual and are constantly being reassessed depending on factors such as time of day or night, past experiences, local knowledge, and presence of others (Lupton, 1999). Fear may often be stimulated by perceived disorders or negative cues (broken windows idea) in a neighborhood though Brunton-Smith (2011) argued that it was difficult to say which came first. Was it the perceived disorder that prompted fear or did fear lead to the perception of disorders? Police have responded to evidence on fear and victimization studies with initiatives such as ‘do not speak to strangers’ to protect children, but part of the problem may lie in the design of city environments and conventional attitudes toward time and place. The step from environmental criminology to ‘designing out crime’ and crime prevention has proved a short one. In his thesis on ‘defensible space,’ Newman (1972) argued that places became more vulnerable if they had bad design features, lacked a sense of territoriality, had poor surveillance, and were stigmatized by their external images. If design could incorporate more positive qualities, it could
create defensible space and become less vulnerable to crime. The most comprehensive test of defensible space principles was provided by Coleman’s (1985) study of housing projects in inner London. She developed a ‘disadvantagement’ score that was made up of measures on a range of indices from presence or absence of overhead walkways to alignments of doors and windows. Coleman demonstrated close correlations of disadvantagement with crime and argued that less disadvantagement meant less crime. Although criticized for neglect of social dimensions, this work had a high impact on policy and on perceived community safety and quality of life. More restricted research designs, such as those to assess the impact of improved street lighting or CCTV camera surveillance, have produced similar positive results. The caveat with such measures is that instead of reducing crime they can simply displace it to other less well-protected areas. The ultimate in designing out crime is evident in rich suburban enclaves where high technology surveillance devices, walls, gates, and guards are used to protect residents. Davis (1990) wrote of fortress Los Angeles, divided between the protected enclaves of the very rich and the territories of the criminalized poor. Geographical research on social conditions also translates easily into crime prevention policies. Block or neighborhood watch is a direct transfer of ideas on community, surveillance, and social control. By mid-2000, 27% of British households (about 6 million) and 40% of the American population were participating in neighborhood watch schemes (Bennett et al., 2008). This analysis showed that there was sufficient evidence to state that neighborhood watch schemes are effective in reducing crime but that the processes that allow that reduction are not well understood. The geography of crime has extended to consideration of policing, sentencing, and the criminal justice system. Early studies showed that sentencing was harsher in certain states and localities: the place where one committed a crime affected the sentence received. At international scale there are clear differences; Islamic law, for example, punishes an offense differently from European law. Within the United States, Florida tends to have more prisoners on death row and more executions (and Jury composition may affect verdicts) and in the United Kingdom, magistrates drawn from one class of society judge offenders from another. Policing as an activity has strong spatial connotations. Police carry images of the city, derived from their experience and passed-on wisdom; these influence the ways in which they police the city. As police patrol areas, they need a detailed understanding of those places; the distributions in space of offenders and offenses are key considerations for them. The police often focus their resources on specific areas and/or crimes for limited periods both in terms of community policing initiatives and crime prevention or target hardening. The policy known as ‘zero tolerance’ has been used to apparently good effect. Geographers have studied policing initiatives such as police consultative committees and the ways in which they are constructed. Studies of the so-called ‘victimless crimes’ of prostitution (Shumsky and Springer, 1981) suggest that policing practice and the variable workings of the criminal justice system shape their geographies. Vice areas emerged and changed within the city in response to varying policing strategies. Beyond policing
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and the courts is the penal system, and as prison populations rise, their distribution and access are significant.
Applied Aspects of the Geography of Crime Crime mapping has moved to higher levels of diagnostic investigation with the development of GIS and its application to crime data. GIS is a technology that is now available in many software packages and these can be customized to serve specific needs. There are generic packages such as Arc Info and Map Info that are widely used in teaching and research. GIS is designed to capture, store, and manipulate all kinds of geographical data and digitally creates integrated data systems. It allows us to view, understand, interpret, and visualize any georeferenced data, and this ability to display and identify relationships is a key quality. Police forces now recognize the value of GIS as a part of crime data analysis and the geocoding of criminal events for computer storage has become standard practice. There are clear advantages in the rapid portrayal of crime patterns and the related ability both to measure the features of the spatial pattern and to explore correlation with other environmental indicators. One police analysis of 79 crimes involving a single serial rapist was reported as involving 790 000 calculations using probabilities of journey to crime to link all points on a grid to the known crime sites (Grescoe, 1996). Perhaps the clearest expression of the applied qualities of geography to the study of crime has been the emergence of geographic crime profiling. This approach uses quantitative models and algorithms of varying levels of sophistication to aid the process of criminal investigation. Data that show where a series of offenses have occurred form the input to a procedure that allows investigators to identify the likely locations or ‘hot-spots’ where the perpetrators of the offenses may be found. Awareness of geographic crime profiling has entered popular crime fiction. Val McDermid’s novels revolve around a psychological profiler named Dr Tony Hill. In one of his investigations (McDermid, 2009) he calls in a Geographic Profiler, who uses an algorithm that he cannot understand, to help pin down the locale of the offender. Crime mapping not only identifies where the actual crime took place but also looks at where the perpetrators and the victims spend their normal lives. Therefore, where they live is of particular relevance and to a lesser, though still significant extent, the places where they work and spend leisure time. Most criminals operate within their ‘comfort zone,’ probably not far from where they live and in environments with which they are familiar. Simple geographic approaches such as centrographic techniques that allow comfort zones to be demarcated were early tools in this type of study. Neil Trainor, a police profiler at Bramshill College, spoke of the relevance of the principle of least effort to criminals; they work close to home, in places with the easiest access and least risk. Rossmo (1999) in his book titled Geographic Profiling, defines it as “an investigative methodology that uses the locations of a connected series of crimes to determine the most probable area of offender residence.” As a police officer, he is clear that geographic profiling has an important supportive role when placed alongside the range
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of policing strategies. Among many other approaches, nongeographic crime profiling is a separate approach that continues to prove its value to many forms of criminal investigation. Yet, Porter (2010) notes that in 1996 the United States National Institute of Justice allocated $15 million to establish a crime mapping research center to promote crime mapping as an analytical tool and this center was renamed Mapping and Analysis for Public safety in 2002. Underpinning the growth of geographic crime profiling has been the broader development and application of the methodology of GIS and its relevance to analysis of crime data. Haining and Ceccato (2010) have conducted many studies based on large georeferenced crime data sets from different countries. The methodology of all this work is quantitative using GIS and spatial modeling and includes studies of car theft and burglary in Stockholm and vandalism in Malmo. Some of this research is not driven by applied dimensions; studies of small area offense rates in the ‘transition states’ of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for example, were designed to test Durkheim’s hypothesis that these political and social changes led to alienation and greater chance of criminality.
Future Directions The geography of crime started from a few simple observations of spatial distributions and extended to a variety of applications of basic disciplinary concepts of space, place, and environment. Current thrusts involve developing pattern analysis through sophisticated information technologies, focusing on the meanings and relevance of place, and examining the interfaces between crime, criminals, and the criminal justice system. Clearly, the basic geographical approach of mapping crime in its various forms and expressions has become a prime focus of attention. Whereas there remain academic questions, such as the significance of place and neighborhood, the epidemiologies of criminal activity, fear and the experience of victims, and the applications of the criminal justice system including policing, the value of crime mapping as an investigative tool is a central concern.
See also: Crime Trends and Debates; Fear of Crime; Policing.
Bibliography Barke, M., Turnbull, G., 1992. Meadowell: The Biography of an Estate with Problems. Avebury, Aldershot, UK. Bennett, T.H., Holloway, K.R., Farrington, D.P., 2008. The effectiveness of neighbourhood watch in reducing crime. Campbell Systematic Reviews. Bottoms, A.E., 1994. Environmental criminology. In: Maguire, M., Morgan, R., Reiner, R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook on Criminology. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 585–656. Bottoms, A.E., Claytor, A., Wiles, P., 1992. Housing markets and residential community crime careers: a case study from Sheffield. In: Evans, D.J., Fyfe, N.R., Herbert, D.T. (Eds.), Crime, Policing and Place: Essays in Environmental Criminology. Routledge, London, pp. 118–144.
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British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2012. Mapping Crime in the Meadowell Estate. CLIP 1129. Brunton-Smith, I., 2011. Untangling the relationship between fear of crime and perceptions of disorder. British Journal of Criminology 51, 885–899. Coleman, A., 1985. Utopia on Trial. Shipman, London. Davis, M., 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. Verso, London. Grescoe, T., September/October 1996. Murder he mapped. Canadian Geographic, 49–52. Guerry, A.M., 1833. Essai sur la Statistique Morale de la France avec Cartes. Crochard, Paris. Haining, R.P., Ceccato, V., 2010. Applying geo-statistical analysis to crime data: carrelated thefts in the Baltic States. Geographical Analysis 42, 53–77. Herbert, D.T., 1976. The study of delinquency areas: a social geographical approach. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 1, 472–492. Herbert, D.T., 1993. Neighborhood incivilities and the study of crime in place. Area 25, 45–54. Herbert, D.T., Hyde, S.W., 1985. Environmental criminology: testing some area hypotheses. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10, 259–274. Lupton, D., 1999. Dangerous places and the unpredictable stranger: constructions of fear of crime. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 32, 1–15.
Mayhew, H., 1861–62. London Labour and the London Poor. Griffin, London, Bohn. McDermid, V., 2009. Fever of the Bone. Sphere, Little Brown Book Group, London. McVie, S., Norris, P., 2006a. Neighborhood Effects on Youth Delinquency and Drug Use. Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, Edinburgh. Publication 10. McVie, S., Norris, P., 2006b. The Effects of Neighborhood on Adolescent Property Offending. Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, Edinburgh. Publication 11. Newman, O., 1972. Defensible Space. Macmillan, New York. Porter, J.R., 2010. Tackling the Mobility of Crime: New Methodologies and Geographies in Modeling the Diffusion of Offending. Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing, Newcastle-on-Tyne. Rossmo, D.K., 1999. Geographic Profiling. CRC Press, New York. Shaw, C.R., McKay, H.D., 1942. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Shumsky, N.L., Springer, L.M., 1981. San Francisco’s zone of prostitution. Journal of Historical Geography 7, 71–89. Smith, S., 2010. Crime, Space and Society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wilson, J.Q., Kelling, G.I., 1982. Broken windows: the police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly 255, 29–38.
Abstract The geography of crime has been recognized for a considerable time but has only in relatively recent years moved into a more central position as a significant part of criminology. There is a strong academic strand that has examined concepts such as crime areas and vulnerable areas and has developed theories to account for their existence in cities. These studies have drawn on geographical concepts such as the importance of place and the dynamics of spatial analysis but have also related to established social science benchmarks such as social disorganization and deviant subcultures. Additionally, a strong applied approach has developed that centers around the concept of geographical profiling and the application of techniques and algorithms of geographical information systems (GIS) to crime data.
Crime has its geographies and is a form of behavior that lends itself to the principles and methods of geographical analysis. Interestingly, the initial awareness of geographical crime patterns had a practical element; it was developed as an analysis with the potential for applications to problem solving. This applied aspect has become more and more predominant in recent times with the advent of procedures such as geographical crime profiling (the application of geographical information systems (GIS) techniques to crime data to allow the probable location of offenders to be identified. It can also be used to predict where offenses are most likely to occur) and the continued evolution of the family of techniques known as GIS (method for the collection and analysis of georeferenced data. It is now widely used by police forces in their use of crime statistics). Many government agencies and police forces now use crime mapping in its various forms as a standard tool in the task of criminal investigations. There are also what might be termed more ‘academic’ studies with no necessary practical outcomes but even they have the potential to contribute to the policy debate of understanding crime and criminals. The recognition of crime patterns at a variety of scales can be traced to studies and reports completed in the early part of the nineteenth century. The geography of crime as a modern subdiscipline has moved from these identifications of patterns to their detailed representation, interpretation, and understanding. There are studies of the places where offenders live and the ways in which places that may be described as crime areas (those parts of the city that persistently suffer the most crime and tend to contain disproportionate numbers of offenders) emerge and persist. There are studies of the places that experience most crime and of the conditions that underpin their vulnerability. Different types of crime have different geographies and even the most simple forms of mapping will reveal these differences. Environmental criminology focuses on crime and place and has extended beyond an interest in the designed or built environment into the role of a more holistic concept of place. People experience crime and they also experience fear of crime and possible victimization, both of these affect their images of the environments in which they live. The neighborhood or residential area is one highly relevant environment and others include the places where they work or enjoy leisure and the ‘pathways’ they follow to reach such
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places. If some of the conditions that contribute to the incidence of crime in space, both real and perceived, can be identified, it is a short step to ameliorative policy formation. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field but it does now encompass a geographical perspective. Crime is a form of deviance that involves the infringement of rules or laws that a specific society has created; both the act of a crime and the behavior of the criminal are therefore socially defined and those definitions will vary from one society to another and also over time within one society. A change in the law relating to drug abuse or traffic offenses, for example, will have significant impact on the geography of crime. The geographic study of crime draws a distinction between the geography of offenses, where crimes are committed, and the geography of offenders, where criminals live. As suggested, there are many different geographies of crime. The places where shoplifting, robbery, and residential burglary occur are all different: the teenage mugger is likely to come from a different kind of neighborhood than the corporate lawyer engaged in tax fraud. This diversity has stimulated study of the geography of crime at a variety of scales. Environmental criminology, with its focus on the places at which crimes occur, offers one organizing framework; the problematic concept of the ‘crime area’ offers another.
Origins The origins of the geography of crime are found in early nineteenth century interest in cartographic criminology. A French statistician, Guerry (1833) who was employed in public service, produced maps showing the regional concentrations of crime. His observation that crimes of violence were disproportionately represented in the south of France led him to link criminal behavior and climate. In England, the social reformers such as Mayhew (1861–62) noted the strong clusters of crimes and criminals in specific areas of cities. Mayhew described the ‘rookeries’ of London where children were “born and bred to the business of crime.” The Chicago studies of Shaw and McKay (1942) established a social science-based perspective on crime or delinquency areas, urban spatial patterns, and gradients and a set of ‘theories,’ principally Social Disorganization, that underpinned the ecology of crime in the city. Their studies gave
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a strong impetus to an academic and theoretical analysis that had practical implications but also conceptual links to the evolving theories of the contemporary Chicago School of Social Ecology. The basic premises were that crime had a spatial order; it was not distributed randomly but showed strong and persistent trends to cluster in poorer, disadvantaged environments. Clifford Shaw moved from this analysis to found the Chicago Area Project aimed at helping youths in disadvantaged neighborhoods and this work has continued to the present day. Subsequent studies have shown a remarkable persistence of these basic qualities of a geography of crime and, further, have also demonstrated that spatial order, clustering, and a link with ‘place’ typify related aspects of the criminal justice system such as sentencing patterns. Policing policies and practices are other areas where these characteristics are evident and worthy of detailed study.
Information Bases The geography of crime shares with criminology in general the problematic nature of the available data. Official crime statistics are suspect because the police record a relatively small minority of offenses that actually occur and apprehend an even smaller number of criminals. Approximately 80% of offenses never enter police records. This ‘dark area’ varies by type of offense. It is very high for offenses such as shoplifting or vandalism and low for car theft or homicide and arises from the unwillingness of the public, as victims or observers, to report crime to the police. Reasons for underreporting range from embarrassment to fear of reprisal to apathy. Police themselves actually observe few criminal events and therefore rely on the public, broadly defined, to notify them when offenses occur. Even the remaining 20% is further diminished by offenses not proceeded with. This underrecording of crime may mean that official data contains biases and deficiencies. Does it overrecord offenses by disadvantaged youths? Does it underrecord whitecollar crime? Official crime statistics may reveal more about those who define criminality and administer the criminal justice system than about the actual incidence and seriousness of crime. The official ‘antidote’ to these concerns about criminal statistics has been the introduction of national crime surveys. Dating in the main from the 1980s, these build upon an older ad hoc tradition of self-report studies and take the form of sample surveys of victimization experience and related attitudes toward crime, justice, law, and order. National crime surveys have confirmed underrecording and have qualified statements on rising crime rates, which may reflect differential recording practice rather than actual changes in crime. They have also augmented our knowledge of topics such as fear of crime. Whereas national crime surveys have not remedied the deficiencies of official criminal statistics, they have allowed for their interpretation in more refined and constructive ways. For geographers, official statistics and national crime surveys are useful for studies of national, regional, and local patterns of criminal activity and the quality of these databases are now well understood. There is continuing interest in identifying new historical data sources. The Bodleian Library at Oxford has a project to digitize records on crimes, murders, executions, and
transportations in nineteenth-century England from the John Johnson Collection and provides links both to the Old Bailey proceedings web site and to sources at Harvard and Austin, Texas, in the United States.
Theoretical Bases The geography of crime draws upon the generic theories of criminology and social science and its own disciplinary concepts. Criminology has nurtured many theories and a significant lack of consensus. Most embrace a ‘multifactor’ explanation, which, despite its diffuseness, is probably correct. There is no single causal explanation for criminality but a ‘package’ of interrelated conditions of varying applicability. Structural theories see criminal behavior as the inevitable outcome of societies that create inequalities. Yet these macrotheories fail to account for the fact that some individuals who suffer from inequality will react criminally, whereas others will not. Geographers have favored those criminological theories that lend themselves to analyses that allow a focus on place. Social disorganization is one such theory. Originating in the Chicago studies of the 1920s and 1930s, this theory linked crime with areas that lacked social order, established values, leaders, and social networks. Comparisons were made with residential areas that did possess these qualities, were ‘socially organized,’ and experienced low rates of crime. Subcultural theory, proposing that crime may be prevalent because it is part of the normal behavior pattern within specific groups, can be found in embryo form in Mayhew’s study of London’s rookeries. Although now argued most consistently in relation to social groups, subcultural theory can be articulated in terms of areas or neighborhoods. Social control theory shares common strands with social disorganization and subculture, emphasizing the positive impacts of social control mechanisms in reducing the incidence of criminal behavior. The mechanism may be good parental supervision, an effective school or teacher, or the effects of voluntary organizations or community groups. It is again a theory that can be adapted to a focus on place and has a central concern with the offenders and where they live. Environmental criminology offers the closest approximation to a geographical ‘theory’ of crime. It emphasizes the criminal act and the location at which it occurs, the ‘where’ rather than the ‘why’ of crime (Bottoms, 1994). Place is central to an approach that acknowledges that each offense leaves a new point on the map and is a clue to the activity space of the offender. The approach draws in considerations of the routine spatial activities of offenders and victims, the concept of journey to crime, and related ideas of territoriality and surveillance. At the present time environmental criminology is more a methodology than a theory. As such it draws heavily on basic geographical concepts such as space and place, and lends itself to detailed spatial analysis through GIS. Conceptual issues include the problem of attaching any independent significance to space and understanding the full range of meanings attached to place, though these are issues that are generic to the study of human geography and are by no means specific to the geography of crime.
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Approaches to the Geography of Crime Studies that merit the description of a geography of crime have changed along with broader paradigm shifts within the social sciences. Cartographic criminology, basically concerned with the mapping of criminal statistics and the representation of spatial patterns, has evolved to reflect wider use of statistical methods including the sophisticated technology of GIS and will be discussed more fully in the next section. The study of crime areas was an early focus for a geography of crime, arising from the persistent evidence that the mapping of both offenders and offenses revealed concentrations or clusters in space and indeed in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This evidence was apparent at a variety of geographical scales from regions to localities within cities but the most significant work arose from Shaw and McKay’s studies of delinquency and crime areas in Chicago. There is persistent evidence for ‘crime areas’ and a simple exercise of mapping crime statistics makes this clear. Although crime areas can be identified in a reasonably clear way, the task of explaining their existence is less straightforward. Statistical analyses reveal strong correlations between the incidence of criminal residence and indicators of a poor residential environment. Measures such as high unemployment rate, low income, substandard housing, and low educational attainment recur and, less frequently, indicators such as lone-parent families and broken homes. Correlates of this kind have been interpreted as indicative of some more general condition such as social disorganization or weak social control, and particular significance is often attached to single measures such as high unemployment. For the most part, however, the results of this type of analysis remain descriptive; they have value in identifying groups and areas from which offenders are likely to come but are in effect markers of some more general social condition as is the crime rate itself. Statistical analyses have also been used as a first stage in the study of crime or delinquency areas. After identifying clusters of offenders and the conditions under which they live, the research task then is to probe more deeply with different research methodologies into the nature of the ‘crime area.’ One approach has identified particular neighborhood characteristics that might predispose residents to criminology. Herbert (1976) compared ‘crime’ and ‘non-crime’ (or at least much less crime) areas in a city, controlling for sociodemographic profiles, and found a consistent difference in terms of sets of values and forms of behavior between the two types of area. In the ‘crime’ areas, parents adopted different approaches to control, had a clear tendency to accept some forms of misbehavior, and the children were lower achievers educationally. Other studies have examined this ‘neighborhood effect’ and the extent to which an individual’s residential area has influence on criminal activity. The Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime was a longitudinal study of the pathways into and out of offending for a cohort of 4328 children who started secondary school in the City of Edinburgh in 1998. One finding was that the characteristics of neighborhoods did play a role, albeit weaker than individual traits such as gender and personality, in influencing their delinquent and drug-taking behavior (McVie and Norris, 2006a).
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Delinquency and hard drug use were influenced by negative conditions such as high levels of deprivation. Another finding was that neighborhood effects were strongest in the earlier years of the cohort at around the age of 12 and became less significant as they became older (McVie and Norris, 2006b). Factors such as low social control and less social organization seemed relevant. Other neighborhood studies have focused on specific issues such as lack of parental supervision. More recently, what might be termed ‘crime area’ studies have taken a known problem area and sought to unravel both its origins and present form. In the United Kingdom, the so-called ‘problem housing estates’ lend themselves to this kind of analysis. Such estates often originated as local housing managers ‘dumped’ known problem families or relocated a slum clearance population to a specific estate. Early episodes of misbehavior reinforced labeling and reputations that have persisted. The Meadowell Study (Barke and Turnbull, 1992), based on an estate of around 2000 homes, demonstrated a lifestyle that was permeated by welfare dependency, drug-trading, petty crime, and vandalism. Often self-selection of tenants who opt for this kind of lifestyle builds the area profile. In late 1991, there were major riots and these events acted as a catalyst for change. Issues such as quality of housing, jobs, and local facilities were addressed with major changes to the physical environment. By mid-2000, significant improvements were being reported and Meadowell was being described as a wellcared for and thriving community (BBC, 2012). Crime areas change over time and as this example shows, they can be recovered by determined social intervention. There is also evidence that they are cyclical in the sense they are worse at specific points of local demographic change. The concept of a ‘community career’ suggests that some localities move through a form of life cycle with highs and lows of criminal activity (Bottoms et al., 1992). The impact of deprivation is far from removed from the concept of crime areas. Sections of urban populations are still being disenfranchised from the rest of society and the notion of a section of society that can be described as the ‘truly disadvantaged’ and the wider idea of an urban underclass exemplify this. Understanding why criminal events occur where they do require different approaches. Criminals respond to opportunities or targets in the environment and the task is to identify these ‘cues.’ A large majority of such crimes are opportunist and involve minimal planning; a minority is ‘professional,’ involving experienced criminals who may spend significant amounts of time preparing for a single criminal event. It is the former that lends itself to analyses based on opportunism and environmental cues. What makes some areas or residential units more vulnerable to crime? First, areas that offer more obvious or lucrative targets for a crime such as burglary are often not likely to experience most offenses. In part this is a function of security, wealthier neighborhoods are able to defend themselves with security devices and forms of control such as block or neighborhood watch and gated communities. Research also shows that burglars tend not to travel far to commit an offense (Herbert and Hyde, 1985). The offender– residence hypothesis suggests that vulnerable areas are either the areas or are close to areas where offenders live.
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Neighborhoods have ‘cores’ and ‘borders’ and the border-zone hypothesis suggests that the borders are more vulnerable. The local social control hypothesis suggests that ordered, wellorganized neighborhoods with a strong sense of community identity experience less crime; the area variability hypothesis suggests that ‘mixed’ areas experience more. Hypotheses of these kinds, focusing on the places at which criminal events occur, blend into the general approach of environmental criminology. So too do studies of incivilities or signs of disorder in the urban environment (Herbert, 1993) and the idea that these may indicate a deteriorating situation in neighborhoods. The well-known study of ‘broken windows’ (Wilson and Kelling, 1982) instigated this line of thinking. Allied to the idea of vulnerable areas that suffer disproportionately from crime are studies of the movements of offenders, sometimes referred to as journeys to crime. There is ample evidence that the majority of offenders do not travel great distances to commit crimes and this is especially true of youths and opportunistic offending. Known areas are the favorite targets and these often correspond with the places and routes offenders travel in their normal everyday lives. For the small minority of professional criminals, the ranges can be much greater and involve planning and observation. As criminals react to cues in the environment so do potential victims. Fear of crime arises from the perception that parts of the city, types of individuals or groups, and times of the day are dangerous and there is evidence for a steady increase in public anxiety about crime and safety (Smith, 2010). People will modify their behavior to cope with fear and to achieve feelings of community safety. Early studies identified residents’ perceived stress areas and showed that these were avoided in everyday routines. Fear of crime is known to be high among old people and women with young children. Victimization experience and fear are linked to deprived areas but also to the routine forms of some urban lifestyles and specific demographic groups. Groups such as the elderly in fact experience less crime than youths but tend to adopt more comprehensive avoidance strategies to reduce risk. More broadly, studies of perceived ‘dangerous places’ suggest that feelings of fear are dynamic and contextual and are constantly being reassessed depending on factors such as time of day or night, past experiences, local knowledge, and presence of others (Lupton, 1999). Fear may often be stimulated by perceived disorders or negative cues (broken windows idea) in a neighborhood though Brunton-Smith (2011) argued that it was difficult to say which came first. Was it the perceived disorder that prompted fear or did fear lead to the perception of disorders? Police have responded to evidence on fear and victimization studies with initiatives such as ‘do not speak to strangers’ to protect children, but part of the problem may lie in the design of city environments and conventional attitudes toward time and place. The step from environmental criminology to ‘designing out crime’ and crime prevention has proved a short one. In his thesis on ‘defensible space,’ Newman (1972) argued that places became more vulnerable if they had bad design features, lacked a sense of territoriality, had poor surveillance, and were stigmatized by their external images. If design could incorporate more positive qualities, it could
create defensible space and become less vulnerable to crime. The most comprehensive test of defensible space principles was provided by Coleman’s (1985) study of housing projects in inner London. She developed a ‘disadvantagement’ score that was made up of measures on a range of indices from presence or absence of overhead walkways to alignments of doors and windows. Coleman demonstrated close correlations of disadvantagement with crime and argued that less disadvantagement meant less crime. Although criticized for neglect of social dimensions, this work had a high impact on policy and on perceived community safety and quality of life. More restricted research designs, such as those to assess the impact of improved street lighting or CCTV camera surveillance, have produced similar positive results. The caveat with such measures is that instead of reducing crime they can simply displace it to other less well-protected areas. The ultimate in designing out crime is evident in rich suburban enclaves where high technology surveillance devices, walls, gates, and guards are used to protect residents. Davis (1990) wrote of fortress Los Angeles, divided between the protected enclaves of the very rich and the territories of the criminalized poor. Geographical research on social conditions also translates easily into crime prevention policies. Block or neighborhood watch is a direct transfer of ideas on community, surveillance, and social control. By mid-2000, 27% of British households (about 6 million) and 40% of the American population were participating in neighborhood watch schemes (Bennett et al., 2008). This analysis showed that there was sufficient evidence to state that neighborhood watch schemes are effective in reducing crime but that the processes that allow that reduction are not well understood. The geography of crime has extended to consideration of policing, sentencing, and the criminal justice system. Early studies showed that sentencing was harsher in certain states and localities: the place where one committed a crime affected the sentence received. At international scale there are clear differences; Islamic law, for example, punishes an offense differently from European law. Within the United States, Florida tends to have more prisoners on death row and more executions (and Jury composition may affect verdicts) and in the United Kingdom, magistrates drawn from one class of society judge offenders from another. Policing as an activity has strong spatial connotations. Police carry images of the city, derived from their experience and passed-on wisdom; these influence the ways in which they police the city. As police patrol areas, they need a detailed understanding of those places; the distributions in space of offenders and offenses are key considerations for them. The police often focus their resources on specific areas and/or crimes for limited periods both in terms of community policing initiatives and crime prevention or target hardening. The policy known as ‘zero tolerance’ has been used to apparently good effect. Geographers have studied policing initiatives such as police consultative committees and the ways in which they are constructed. Studies of the so-called ‘victimless crimes’ of prostitution (Shumsky and Springer, 1981) suggest that policing practice and the variable workings of the criminal justice system shape their geographies. Vice areas emerged and changed within the city in response to varying policing strategies. Beyond policing
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and the courts is the penal system, and as prison populations rise, their distribution and access are significant.
Applied Aspects of the Geography of Crime Crime mapping has moved to higher levels of diagnostic investigation with the development of GIS and its application to crime data. GIS is a technology that is now available in many software packages and these can be customized to serve specific needs. There are generic packages such as Arc Info and Map Info that are widely used in teaching and research. GIS is designed to capture, store, and manipulate all kinds of geographical data and digitally creates integrated data systems. It allows us to view, understand, interpret, and visualize any georeferenced data, and this ability to display and identify relationships is a key quality. Police forces now recognize the value of GIS as a part of crime data analysis and the geocoding of criminal events for computer storage has become standard practice. There are clear advantages in the rapid portrayal of crime patterns and the related ability both to measure the features of the spatial pattern and to explore correlation with other environmental indicators. One police analysis of 79 crimes involving a single serial rapist was reported as involving 790 000 calculations using probabilities of journey to crime to link all points on a grid to the known crime sites (Grescoe, 1996). Perhaps the clearest expression of the applied qualities of geography to the study of crime has been the emergence of geographic crime profiling. This approach uses quantitative models and algorithms of varying levels of sophistication to aid the process of criminal investigation. Data that show where a series of offenses have occurred form the input to a procedure that allows investigators to identify the likely locations or ‘hot-spots’ where the perpetrators of the offenses may be found. Awareness of geographic crime profiling has entered popular crime fiction. Val McDermid’s novels revolve around a psychological profiler named Dr Tony Hill. In one of his investigations (McDermid, 2009) he calls in a Geographic Profiler, who uses an algorithm that he cannot understand, to help pin down the locale of the offender. Crime mapping not only identifies where the actual crime took place but also looks at where the perpetrators and the victims spend their normal lives. Therefore, where they live is of particular relevance and to a lesser, though still significant extent, the places where they work and spend leisure time. Most criminals operate within their ‘comfort zone,’ probably not far from where they live and in environments with which they are familiar. Simple geographic approaches such as centrographic techniques that allow comfort zones to be demarcated were early tools in this type of study. Neil Trainor, a police profiler at Bramshill College, spoke of the relevance of the principle of least effort to criminals; they work close to home, in places with the easiest access and least risk. Rossmo (1999) in his book titled Geographic Profiling, defines it as “an investigative methodology that uses the locations of a connected series of crimes to determine the most probable area of offender residence.” As a police officer, he is clear that geographic profiling has an important supportive role when placed alongside the range
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of policing strategies. Among many other approaches, nongeographic crime profiling is a separate approach that continues to prove its value to many forms of criminal investigation. Yet, Porter (2010) notes that in 1996 the United States National Institute of Justice allocated $15 million to establish a crime mapping research center to promote crime mapping as an analytical tool and this center was renamed Mapping and Analysis for Public safety in 2002. Underpinning the growth of geographic crime profiling has been the broader development and application of the methodology of GIS and its relevance to analysis of crime data. Haining and Ceccato (2010) have conducted many studies based on large georeferenced crime data sets from different countries. The methodology of all this work is quantitative using GIS and spatial modeling and includes studies of car theft and burglary in Stockholm and vandalism in Malmo. Some of this research is not driven by applied dimensions; studies of small area offense rates in the ‘transition states’ of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for example, were designed to test Durkheim’s hypothesis that these political and social changes led to alienation and greater chance of criminality.
Future Directions The geography of crime started from a few simple observations of spatial distributions and extended to a variety of applications of basic disciplinary concepts of space, place, and environment. Current thrusts involve developing pattern analysis through sophisticated information technologies, focusing on the meanings and relevance of place, and examining the interfaces between crime, criminals, and the criminal justice system. Clearly, the basic geographical approach of mapping crime in its various forms and expressions has become a prime focus of attention. Whereas there remain academic questions, such as the significance of place and neighborhood, the epidemiologies of criminal activity, fear and the experience of victims, and the applications of the criminal justice system including policing, the value of crime mapping as an investigative tool is a central concern.
See also: Crime Trends and Debates; Fear of Crime; Policing.
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British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2012. Mapping Crime in the Meadowell Estate. CLIP 1129. Brunton-Smith, I., 2011. Untangling the relationship between fear of crime and perceptions of disorder. British Journal of Criminology 51, 885–899. Coleman, A., 1985. Utopia on Trial. Shipman, London. Davis, M., 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. Verso, London. Grescoe, T., September/October 1996. Murder he mapped. Canadian Geographic, 49–52. Guerry, A.M., 1833. Essai sur la Statistique Morale de la France avec Cartes. Crochard, Paris. Haining, R.P., Ceccato, V., 2010. Applying geo-statistical analysis to crime data: carrelated thefts in the Baltic States. Geographical Analysis 42, 53–77. Herbert, D.T., 1976. The study of delinquency areas: a social geographical approach. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 1, 472–492. Herbert, D.T., 1993. Neighborhood incivilities and the study of crime in place. Area 25, 45–54. Herbert, D.T., Hyde, S.W., 1985. Environmental criminology: testing some area hypotheses. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10, 259–274. Lupton, D., 1999. Dangerous places and the unpredictable stranger: constructions of fear of crime. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 32, 1–15.
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