“EXPLANATIONS OF CRIME AND PLACE”

Anthony E. Bottoms and Paul Wiles (1992)

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STATISTICAL DISTRIBUTIONS AND ETHNOGRAPHY: HISTORY AND PROBLEMATIC

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

                The Chicago theory of social disorganization has been very influential in the history of criminology.  It appears to offer an answer to the problem of the relationship between studies of the areal statistical distribution of crime and offending, and studies of the ethnography of criminal behaviour.  As a result much subsequent criminological research used the idea of social disorganization as a central concept.

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STRUCTURATION THEORY

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Giddens (1984) insists that both action and structure exist only within the ongoing process of human existence, which is largely constituted in practical consciousness.  Structures, for Giddens, are properties which both allow and result in a practical consciousness which is able to follow regular patterns over time/space.  The same practical rules which guide the social action of individuals are at the same time the basis for the reproduction of social systems.  Looked at in this way the ‘structure’ of place is not simply a constraint on action but instead is one part of the social system which informs the practical (and sometimes discursive) consciousness of social actors.  Put more simply, if we want to understand the geography of crime we have to understand how place, over time, is part of the practical consciousness of social actors who engage in behaviour, including actions we define as criminal.  The structure of place is central, but it is not external to human agency and must be understood as part of a historical process.

                Giddens’s theory, then, gives us a model of explanation which we can use to examine critically some recent environmental criminology.  Place cannot be made epiphenomenal to the explanation of human activity (as some human geographers once, suicidally, seemed to want to suggest) because place, together with time, are intrinsic dimensions of human existence.  On acting, agents have to come to terms with the intrinsicality of space/time – which […] they frequently do through routines.  How they do so, whether they do so in different ways, and how modernity has extended the possible ways in which different actors operate in space/time are all interesting and empirical questions.  All of us use our sense of ‘locale’ […] to guide our everyday actions, and this is no less true in relation to crime.  As Reiss put it, in mercifully straightforward terms,

Our sense of personal safety and potential victimization by crime is shaped less by knowledge of specific criminals than it is by knowledge of dangerous and safe places and communities. (1986: 1)

                To this one might add, first, that the general public’s sense of safety relates not only to place but also to different times of day in place, and second, that the everyday life of offenders, as well as victims and potential victims, is shaped in part by understandings of the nature of particular areas and, within them, of specific locations – and those understandings are undoubtedly important in shaping the geographical distribution of offending behaviour.

STRUCTURATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMINOLOGY

Let us now consider how structuration theory can help take forward the study of environmental criminology.

                To assess this issue we shall examine a recent essay by Per-Olof Wikstrom (1990), written in an attempt to summarize the literature on crime, criminality and the urban structure as a background paper for a new and major empirical research project in Stockholm.  Wikstrom’s paper is both up-to-date and of high quality; it provides, therefore, a useful exemplar of the ‘state of the art’ in environmental criminology, and a way of testing whether the application of a structuration approach (which Wikstrom does not consider) might have something to offer to this field of study.

                Like most environmental criminologists, Wikstrom draws a clear distinction between area offender rates and area offence rates […]  In summarizing the relationship between urban structure (especially housing) and area offender rates, Wikstrom postulates two main effects:

1 Housing and [offender-rate based] criminality are related because social groups with a greater propensity to crime are concentrated in certain types of housing…

2 Housing can itself affect the resident’s propensity to crime in that the local housing conditions are of importance both to the social life and the social control of the neighbourhood (the ‘contextual’ effect).  This effect may be subdivided into

(a) situational influence on propensity to offend; and

(b) long-term influence on the development of the individual resident’s personality and life-style, tending to reinforce a propensity to crime… (primarily applies to neighbourhood influences on children and young people). (1990: 17)

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                Turning to the relationship between urban structures and area offence rates, Wikstrom adopts an approach arising out of routine activities theory, and opportunity theory:

Inter-district variations in the use of the urban land generate different activities more or less frequently at different times of the week and day in different parts of the city.  Segregation and the spatial variation in the pursuit of various activities, each of which will be perceived as more or less attractive by different social groups, ensure that the social make-up of residents and visitors at different times of day will show distinct inter-district variations.

                The type of activities being pursued and the social composition of the people in the district at any one time can be assumed to be related to

1 the availability of suitable criminal targets, the presence of motivated offenders and the presence of direct social control (capable guardians) [explanation of offence rates for instrumental crime];

2 the occurrence of encounters (environments) liable to provoke friction in the parochial and public orders [explanation of some expressive crime]. (1990: 23)

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UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF ACTION AND PROCESSES OF CHANGE

An important aspect of Giddens’s structuration theory is that the structures which result from human action are not just a result of the intended consequences of such actions.  Indeed, Giddens’s notion that human action largely follows ‘routines’ precisely emphasizes the inadequacy of a fully intentional model of human action.  The result is that not only may the consequences of rationally calculated action be unforeseen by actors (or foreseen but unintended), but also human action may not be guided by conscious intention at all.  In sum, the structural results of a series of human actions may be quite different from what the actors may have foreseen or intended.

                Giddens gives as an example a model of how racial segregation in a city might occur:

A pattern of ethnic segregation might develop, without any of those involved intending this to happen, in the following way, which can be illustrated by analogy.  Imagine a chessboard which has a set of 5-pence pieces and a set of 10-pence pieces.  These are distributed randomly on the board, as individuals might be in an urban area.  It is presumed that, while they feel no hostility towards the other group, the members of each group do not want to live in a neighbourhood where they are ethnically in a minority.  On the chessboard each piece is moved around until it is in such a position that at least 50 per cent of the adjoining pieces are of the same type.  The result is a pattern of extreme segregation.  The 10-pence pieces end up as a sort of ghetto in the midst of the 5-pence pieces.  The ‘composition effect’ is an outcome of an aggregate of acts – whether those of moving pieces on the board or those of agents in a housing market – each of which is intentionally carried out.  But the eventual outcome is neither intended nor desired by anyone.  It is, as it were, everyone’s doing and no one’s. (1984: 10)

                It is interesting that Giddens introduces the concept of a ‘market’ into this example, since this concept is used by economists to signify the summation of the consequences of individual economic decisions, regardless of whether those consequences intended or foreseen by the actors.  Taub et al. (1984), in their study of the decline of neighbourhoods in Chicago in both racial and crime terms, use a similar market-based model to explain the actions of individual householders (as opposed to corporations etc).  They argue that such individual residents, when faced with signs of neighbourhood decline, can take decisions only in terms of their own purposes and in the context of their (limited) understanding of what other residents will do.  The result can be that, in a similar way to Giddens’s example, while none of the residents have an interest in the neighbourhood declining, the unintended consequence of their individual decisions can be precisely that.

                The idea of a ‘market’, of course, is a model developed to help understand the aggregate results of action from an economic point of view and although, as Taub et al. have shown, it can be usefully employed to help explain the processes by which neighbourhoods decline it is not in itself wholly adequate to explain why a neighbourhood’s crime or offender-rate pattern changes.  What seems to be needed, then, is a model of neighbourhood activity which helps us to understand how changing crime or offending behaviour can be the result of a summation of individual actions, and their intended, unintended and unforeseen consequences: in other words, we need a construct which will fulfil for criminology some of the functions which the market fulfils for economists.

                Some time ago Albert Reiss suggested that changes in neighbourhood crime patterns could be thought of as analogous to communities having crime careers (Reiss, 1986).  Reiss did not develop this idea of ‘community crime careers’ much further, but in our view it is extremely suggestive.  The term ‘community crime career’ in effect encompasses the notion that a neighbourhood’s crime pattern is the summation of the consequences, whether intended or not, of the way a multitude of actors interact (which itself is linked to their practical consciousness of locale) in an historical process.  As such it can equally be applied to offender changes in or offence-rate crime patterns, or to the relationship between the two. […]

                Some help in developing this concept may perhaps be obtained by considering again the work of Taub et al. (1984), although the writing of these authors predates that of Reiss.  When they constructed a general theory of neighbourhood change out of their research, Taub et al. argued that

There are three types of social and ecological pressures that interactively determine the pattern of change in urban neighbourhoods: (1) ecological facts; (2) corporate and institutional decisions; and (3) decisions of individual neighbourhood residents. (1984: 182)

They pointed out that, traditionally, most urban theorists have concentrated on the ‘ecological facts’ as the main explanatory variable as regards general social change in neighbourhoods, giving a strongly structured quality to such explanations.  Such an emphasis, Taub and his colleagues believed,

Gives the wrong impression about the dynamics of neighbourhood change.  Individual residents and local corporate actors are, after all, the ones whose day-to-day decisions define the texture and quality of urban life.  If ecological facts are overwhelming, it is because of the effect of those facts on the perception and actions of individual and corporate actors.  In a neighbourhood that goes up or down, it is ultimately the actions of these residents that make the outcomes real. (1984: 186)

Although their language is different these authors are essentially following the model of explanation proposed by Giddens in insisting that ‘place’ has to be considered always as it is constituted through human action.  Their three-fold interactive model of ecological facts/individual decisions/corporate decisions also offers a valuable framework for analysis of area change, even though the concept of ‘ecological facts’ needs some reinterpretation from the standpoint of structuration theory.

                Despite its merits, however, Taub et al.’s model is of limited value for present purposes because the analysis of individual and corporate actors’ perceptions and decisions is applied only to the operations of the property market and its consequences.  If we are to develop the notion of ‘community crime career’ more generally, then we need to extend this type of analysis to encompass all the structures which are relevant to the processes of change in offender and offence rates, as illustrated, for example, in Wikstrom’s summaries. […]

                One other matter, of some importance for what we would regard as an adequate development of Taub et al.’s analysis, must be raised here.  Even where actors appear to be operating in a market type situation, a model which focuses on their actions as motivated solely towards that market will have serious inadequacies.  One only has to reflect momentarily on the reality of actors’ behaviour in parts of the British housing market to see why this is so.  Even after the changes of the 1980s a significant proportion of the British housing stock exists within a market of bureaucratic allocation, whose rules are very different from those of a price market. […]  In this sector actors need a very sophisticated understanding of the rules of the market in order adequately to foresee the consequences of their choices; yet there is some evidence to suggest that in some areas the allocation process is operated by the local authority in such a paternalistic way that actors do not even perceive that they have a choice.  Even where actors do understand that they have a choice, and understand the rules of allocation, it does not necessarily follow that they will maximize the benefits available to them as the model of a rationally calculating market actor would suggest.  In the 1980s replication stage of the Sheffield research tenants in a notorious high-rise block of flats had to be re-housed due to its impending demolition.  Because of the rules of allocation in Sheffield, these ‘clearance’ tenants had priority in the allocation to vacant housing units in the local authority’s stock, and they could therefore have secured transfers on to some of the most select council estates in the city.  In fact few of them chose to do so even though advisers, ranging from community workers to police community constables, explained to them how to do so.  Most of them instead chose to move to nearby (and by no means select) estates.  The reason was because their bounded sense of location meant that they regarded the alternative select estates as inappropriate for them either in geographical terms (they did not ‘belong’ in a different sector of the city) or in class terms (the select estates were for the ‘respectable’).  Such a sense of locale is particularly powerful in Sheffield: one community constable, who was bemoaning the tenants’ refusal to maximize the advantage available to them, was reminded by his colleague that he had himself declined a transfer to a different police division because he didn’t feel at home in the area!  However, a sense of location is merely one of the other aspects of structure, which needs to be built into the full development of a concept of community crime career. […]

DEVELOPING THE COMMUNITY CRIME CAREER CONCEPT: OFFENDER AND OFFENCE RATE VARIATIONS CONSIDERED

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City centres have few residents, but a disproportionate incidence of criminal incidents relate to their land use area (Baldwin and Bottoms, 1976).  Thus the city centre is a paradigm case of a high offence area which is not a high offender area.  In the daytime the city centre is of course a hive of commercial and other activity; much of the daytime crime consists of shoplifting or auto-crime, but more personalized crime such as bag-snatching may also feature, considerably aided by the anonymity of the city centre crowd (Poyner, 1983; ch.6).  At night the city centre changes character in terms of both activities and its user population (the average age plummets as the centre is largely taken over by youths).  Crimes of public violence and disorder occur disproportionately in city centres at night, often in or cllose to pubs, clubs or other places of entertainment: these crimes are highly focused upon Friday and Saturday evenings, with a special time focus on pub and club closing times (Hope, 1985; Ramsay, 1982; Wikstrom, 1985).  Such incidents are also highly localized, with a few locations providing a disproportionate share of the crimes (Hope, 1985; Sherman et al., 1989).

                We immediately see here clear evidence of differential social activity in space/time by different groups, even in an area which is open to all.  Further detailed research would probably show age, class, and/or sex segregation in specific locations within the city centre both by day and by night – and would almost certainly show some city centre users to be anxious about groups of youths hanging about (Phillips and Cochrane, 1988) or vagrant alcoholics (Ramsay, 1989).  Owners of specific premises may seek to achieve a degree of social segregation by manipulating the sense of location (elaborate entrance portals to an exclusive hotel; interior design deliberately calculated to make a particular age group, class or sex feel at home); others may seek to boost a sense of safety through the employment of private security companies (as, increasingly, in shopping malls with multiple retail outlets) or physical security devices (use of CCTV, and so on).  There is clearly here a rich field of exploration in the patterning of use of the city centre, and, by those who do use it, in the patterning of the use of specific sites.  Nor is any of this static.  Perceptions of the desirability of a particular shop/café/bar can easily change over time, and individual decisions about custom can cumulatively have important long-term consequences.  Add to this the fact that city centres themselves change over time, both in their land use and design (increasing use of pedestrianized streets, increasing developments of multiple stores rather than small shops, and so on) and in their social use (the city centre in the evening in the early 1960s was much less predominantly a young person’s domain), and we begin to see the complexity of the whole picture within which city centre crime must be understood. […]

CONCLUSION

What we have tried to argue in this chapter is that a proper understanding of the spatial aspects of offences and offending is possible only if a model is employed which is capable of including the natural and built environment, the political, economic, social and cultural contexts and structures of areas and the actions of individuals and corporate bodies within areas, within a theory which accounts for the ongoing processes of interaction between them.  We have used Giddens’s structuration theory because we believe that it offers such a framework, and we have tried to show how the elements of this approach can illuminate current work within environmental criminology.

                The task of developing a more adequate environmental criminology seems to us rather urgent at the present time, since for  a variety of reasons the structures and understandings which underpin much existing scholarship are undergoing some rapid changes […]  The tenure map of Britain is being redrawn, and this may well have significant consequences for the geography of crime.  Perhaps more fundamental is the movement of the urban middle class into rural communities, and the consequential push of the less affluent rural young into the towns in search of affordable housing: the old rural/urban crime patterns will almost certainly be affected by this process.  In the towns themselves, city centres are increasingly facing competition from large out-of-town shopping areas on the North American model, where rather different strategies of social control and segregation are being deployed.  Industry and commerce, and even retailing, are also increasingly being segregated from residential areas and placed on industrial estates, technology parks, and so on.  At the same time as the geography of Britain is being altered in these ways, so also technological innovations are constantly affecting the ability of social actors (both individuals and corporate bodies) to manipulate the constraints of both time and distance.  If, as Giddens suggests, our sense of location is a key aspect of our social existence and is a product of our experience and interaction within space/time then the sense of location of many modern Britons is likely to be significantly changed.  If it is, then the appropriateness of place to life-style, including the criminal, and to life experiences, including victimization, will also change.  It is therefore vital that we should possess an adequate model for understanding these processes and their criminological consequences.  We can at any rate confidently predict that there will be no shortage of interesting research topics for future environmental criminologists.

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