Urban streets as micro contexts to commit violence

Abstract

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. © 2009 Springer New York.