Abstract
Crime is highly concentrated at a relatively few addresses, regardless of the city or neighborhood examined and regardless of the types of place. Though W.E.B. DuBois and Charles Booth provided evidence that crime varies by property parcel, this social fact was buried by the Chicago School of Criminology’s theory of socially disorganized neighborhoods. In the late 1980s, the importance of place was rediscovered. Our book examines the causes of place-based crime. It reveals a form of social control usually overlooked: place management. In this chapter, we define our terms, lay out our argument, and pose four questions for policy makers and researchers: (1) Where precisely is crime the highest? (2) Who owns or operates these places? (3) How do owners’ management practices create crime opportunities? (4) What can be done to get the managers of these few crime-prone places to change their practices so that crime declines?
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Eck, J.E., Linning, S.J., Herold, T.D. (2023). Places and Crime. In: Place Management and Crime. SpringerBriefs in Criminology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27693-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27693-4_1
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