Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue

Scientific Reports

Nowadays, 23% of the world population lives in multi-million cities. In these metropolises, criminal activity is much higher and violent than in either small cities or rural areas. thus, understanding what factors influence urban crime in big cities is a pressing need. Seminal studies analyse crime records through historical panel data or analysis of historical patterns combined with ecological factor and exploratory mapping. More recently, machine learning methods have provided informed crime prediction over time. However, previous studies have focused on a single city at a time, considering only a limited number of factors (such as socio-economical characteristics) and often at large in a single city. Hence, our understanding of the factors influencing crime across cultures and cities is very limited. Here we propose a Bayesian model to explore how violent and property crimes are related not only to socioeconomic factors but also to the built environmental (e.g. land use) and mobility characteristics of neighbourhoods. to that end, we analyse crime at small areas and integrate multiple open data sources with mobile phone traces to compare how the different factors correlate with crime in diverse cities, namely Boston, Bogotá, Los Angeles and Chicago. We find that the combined use of socioeconomic conditions, mobility information and physical characteristics of the neighbourhood effectively explain the emergence of crime, and improve the performance of the traditional approaches. However, we show that the socio-ecological factors of neighbourhoods relate to crime very differently from one city to another. Thus there is clearly no "one fits all" model. Criminology widely recognizes the importance of places 1,2 : crime occurs in small areas such as street segments, buildings or parks, and it is spatially stable over time 3,4. However, theoretical and empirical research showed that crime is also a consequence of socioeconomic contextual characteristics, usually referred to as the "neighbourhood effect" 5,6. In criminology, cooperation, as opposed to disorganization of neighbours, is indeed believed to create the mechanisms by which residents themselves achieve guardianship and public order 7 , solve common problems, and reduce violence 7-9. This mechanism also finds its roots in urban planning, where the relationship between specific aspects of urban architecture 10 and urban physical characteristics 11 are related to security. Places and neighbourhoods are not to be considered islands unto themselves, as they are embedded in a city-wide system of social interactions. On a daily basis, people's routine exposes residents to different conditions, possibilities 12 , and this routine may favour crime 13. Nevertheless, many empirical studies focus on just a subset of static factors at a time such as socioeconomic factors without considering the contextual built environment 8,9,14-17 , or ignoring mobility 15,16,18,19 , and often only drawing results in a single city (e.g. Chicago) 8,9,15,19-26. Studies on small areas and neighbourhoods roughly come from two streams of literature. The first stream focuses on the routine activity and crime pattern theories 13,27,28 at places. These studies suggest that crime occurs

Security Journal, 2014

Criminology, 1976

In an effort to evaluate the situational determinants of crime, principal components analysis was used to reduce 59 demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of 840 American cities to six independent factors: affluence, stage in life cycle, economic specialization, expenditures policy, poverty, and urbanization. When regressed upon crime rates two of these six factors, urbanization and poverty, were found to be the more important criminogenic forces. The exception to this generalization ws the South, where stage in life cycle was more important than poverty in explaining crime. One reason for this exception may be that the South, though having a lower standard of living than other regions of the country, does not have the "culture of poverty '' usually associated with lower income. Contrary to the assumption upon which most ecology of crime studies are based, larger cities (over 100,000 in population) are not representative of all cities. Greater association between socioeconomic variables and crime was found in larger than in smaller cities.

This study shows that as societies transform from rural to urban societies people imbibe the urban lifestyles or cultures known as 'urbanism'. It is characterized by individualism, anonymity among others. Lack of intimate relationship coupled with some other factors such as unemployment, poverty, etc., predispose people, especially young men and women to crime committal.

Putting Crime in its Place, 2009

Opportunities for crime are assumed to be highly localized. Therefore, using streets as units of analysis offers insight into crime patterns that are lost when they are aggregated to the neighborhood level. Previous street-level studies on crime have concentrated on variations in the amount of incidents. According to Crime Pattern Theory, more crime is expected to occur where people's routine activities coincide with suitable targets in poorly guarded circumstances. However, the theory, if extended further, is also applicable to street-level variation in qualitative aspects of crime, such as the relation between offender and victim and the use of weapons. The reason for this is that the routine of everyday life determines spatial concentrations of certain types of people at specific locales, which may determine the way crime is committed in a particular street if the characteristics of its visitors are related to the nature of the crimes committed there. For instance, if a street attracts young people, and young people use guns more often, then gun related violence will be more frequent in that street. This chapter focuses on the volume as well as the nature of violent crime, based on a sample of approximately 600 incidents committed in certain streets in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The results suggest that (a) accessibility and social disorganization increase the number of crimes in a street, (b) co-offending and the relation between offender and victim vary significantly between streets, while weapon use and victim injury do not, and (c) incident characteristics and the street's accessibility play an important role in explaining street-level differences in the relation between victim and offender. The latter finding supports the hypothesis derived from Crime Pattern Theory that the daily functions of streets serve as a selection mechanism for who visits the street and subsequently determine against whom violence is committed in that locality. 199 D. Weisburd et al. (eds.), Putting Crime in its Place,

article in Volume 1, Issue 2 (see also The Ohio State University Libraries Knowledge Bank for all issues and articles in IJRC)

Urbanization, as considered from the economic aspect is good as it facilitates achievement of economies and thus promotes growth of industries and development in the economy. However, taking the social point of view urbanization encourage crimes as is evident from the fact that the rate of crime is higher in large cities and in urbanized areas as has been proved by many empirical studies. Urbanization per se is not the only cause for rising trend of crime, but, there are many other determinants alongside urbanization and closely related to it, that have a direct say in the rising trend of crimes in urbanized areas. These are unemployment, inflation and income inequality. However, these related determinants often are associated with urbanization or its consequence, so the root cause remains the process of urbanization. Very often, the question as to why there are more crimes in cities comes to mind which is promptly being answered by the fact that one can count many crime reports in cities as compared to rural area. It could be due to the fact that rural crimes are not properly reported or hyped through media due to which a common perception perpetuates that the crime rate is more in cities. In the recent past, however, many empirical studies were carried out to find out the "urbanization -crime nexus" and it was found that the two are associated terms, although, the universality of that nexus is yet to be established as there are many urbanized areas where the reports of crime are too meager. In this paper, I would delineate various aspects of urbanization which in some way have contributed to the rise of crime rates in cities. In Indian context, during past few years the crime rate has increased within the sphere of urbanized areas which shall also be peeped into during the course of this paper.

2012

J Urban Hist, 2003

Journal of Criminal Justice, 2010

The nexus between urbanity and crime is interpreted as being congruent with either social breakdown or subculture theory. Each of these perspectives offers differing conceptualizations of the causal mechanisms responsible for this linkage, but adjudicating between them has proven exceedingly difficult because their respective predictions are similar. Each theory posits that an urban environment amplifies criminal activity. Using data derived from the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), this study contributes to the literature by investigating whether urbanization influences co-offending behavior. The determination of whether urbanity affects co-offending has theoretical relevance because social breakdown theory argues that urbanity produces interpersonal estrangement that impedes the development of friendship networks needed to facilitate group-based criminal offending. Conversely, subculture theory postulates that an urban environment propagates deviant subcultures that act to engender group-based rather than individualist criminality. Multivariate regression results furnish evidence supporting social breakdown theory by demonstrating that urbanity decreases co-offending behavior.