Situational Crime

Environmental criminology looks at the relationship between crime and its geographical or spatial environment: the extent to which crime is concentrated in particular places and what factors lead to higher crime rates. Situational crime prevention has developed out of research on crime hot spots, to see how situations can be altered to eliminate or reduce the opportunity for offenders to commit crime—on the principle that, even if there is a motivated offender and a relevant target, reducing the opportunity to offend will make crime less likely. Situational crime prevention has scored notable successes, particularly in relation to short-term prevention of property offenses, but to produce longlasting effects, it may well need to be supplemented by measures aimed at reducing the propensity to offend and enhancing community empowerment.

Environmental criminology has a long history: “dangerous places” were a feature of Victorian views about criminogenesis of the slums in London and other major cities. The field's major parameters were established in the work of the Chicago school in the 1930s and 1940s. Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay mapped crime rates in different parts of Chicago and developed, following E. W. Burgess's ecological model of urban development, a theory that high crime was related to the flow of immigrants into the city and their subsequent economic progress. Immediately outside the central business district, Shaw and McKay found a transitional area with generally high crime rates, where new immigrants found housing. As they became more established, immigrants moved outward to traditional working-class areas and subsequently to the suburbs, while new immigrants took their place. The result was a set of concentric rings of crime rates, with the highest in this transitional zone, characterized by constant population movement and consequent social disorganization. Social disorganization, more recently linked to drug-based economies in the United States and to lack of social capital and social effectiveness, has remained a key concept in explaining neighborhood variation in numbers of offenders.

The Chicago work, however, elided areas where high numbers of offenders lived (high offender residence areas) with high crime rate areas. As the Chicago empirical results were tested out in different cities and other countries, most notably by John Baldwin and Anthony Bottoms in Sheffield, United Kingdom, [Page 1372]and Per-Olof Wikstrom in Scandinavia from the 1970s onward, it became clear that different factors were driving offense rates and offender rates. Offense rates were a function of having suitable targets, as well as potential offenders. Crime, apart from vehicle crime, is often committed close to offenders' homes—in the next street or the next neighborhood—so that poorer areas, with a larger proportion of offenders, usually have higher crime rates. However, crime rates are also high in places where offenders routinely go and with which they are familiar (such as town centers and leisure facilities). The recent development of using geographical information system (GIS) technology to map offense rates and offender rates and to link these to both social indices and target attractiveness is proving profitable both for the development of environmental criminological theory and for targeting policing and crime prevention resources.

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