Social Capital and Poor Communities

4: Crime and Public Safety: Insights from Community-Level Perspectives on Social Capital

Chapter 4 Crime and Public Safety: Insights from Community-Level Perspectives on Social Capital Robert J. Sampson Research has long shown that crimes involving interpersonal violence are more frequent in socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Drawing on the concept of social capital, recent work has attempted to unpack why this is so and what might be done to improve the level of safety in poor communities. In this chapter, I assess the state of current knowledge on the relevance of social capital to the known facts about crime and public safety, including theoretical formulations on what social capital means at the neighborhood level, criticisms of the concept, and proposed revisions. I then review research attempting to measure key aspects of social capital and related constructs such as informal social control, collective efficacy, institutional support, and intergenerational ties. I pay special attention to the role of local institutions in fostering public safety, especially the integration of formal institutions of social control like the police with informal actions by community residents. Finally, I discuss some promising research and intervention efforts that attempt to put social capital to work in reducing crime and disorder.1 FACTS ON CRIME AND PUBLIC SAFETY The first thing to know about predatory crimes is that they are disproportionately concentrated geographically.2 Earlier, in the last century, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1969 [1942]) demonstrated that high rates of delinquency persisted in the same areas over many years, regardless of population turnover. More than any other, this finding led them to question highly individualistic explanations of delinquency and to focus on the processes by which criminal patterns of behavior were transmitted across generations in areas of poverty, instability, and weak social controls (see also Bursik 1988). To this day, research has demonstrated that crimes are not randomly distributed in space. Rather, they are disproportionately concentrated I 89 Social Capital and Poor Communities in certain neighborhoods and "places" (for example, taverns and parking lots). Ecologically oriented criminologists have dubbed these areas "hot spots" of predatory crime (Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger 1989; Sherman 1995). It follows that the goal of community-level research is not to explain individual involvement in criminal behavior, but to identify characteristics of neighborhoods and places that lead to high rates of crime.3 The neighborhood-level perspective that I explicate heeds this goal and in so doing emphasizes rates of crime events more than the production of offenders. The"routine activities" perspective in criminology (Cohen and Felson 1979) provides the insight that predatory crime requires the intersection in time and space of three elements-motivated offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians to prevent the event. The underappreciated lessons from this perspective are that a motivated offender is not sufficient to produce a crime and that illegal activities feed on the spatial and temporal structure of routine legal activities (transportation, work, shopping, family household configuration). Routine-activities models thus train an analytic eye on the explanation of crime events, assuming a pool of motivated offenders. This approach may seem like a radical departure for those accustomed to thinking about individual offenders, but it makes sense when operating at the level of the community. Indeed, it is logically possible to have no variation across neighborhoods in the prevalence of offenders but a high concentration of the manifestations of their behavior (crime events) in a few neighborhoods (for example, because of low social control or opportunities). I focus for the rest of this chapter on an event-based, neighborhood-level perspective on crime and public safety. I take seriously, in other words, how neighborhoods fare as units of control, guardianship, and socialization over their own public spaces with respect to crime. The unit of analysis becomes the neighborhood, and the phenomenon of interest the crime events within its purview. The policy implication , to be explored later, is that we can have some influence over the incidence of crime without necessarily changing the propensity of offenders (see also Stark 1987). From a sociological view, I would add that we should not be solely concerned with questions about individuals, such as whether it was Sally or Joe who committed a criminal act, but with the distribution of acts. Individuals, we should remind ourselves, are replaceable. Defining Local Community It is useful to begin by considering how neighborhoods have been defined for the purposes of empirical research. A traditional and well-worn definition of neighborhood is an ecological subsection of a larger community-a collection of people and...