An agile literature review on the topic of crime city

 

Working paper: jh-2021-03-29-a (https://josephho33.blogspot.com/2021/03/an-agile-literature-review-on-topic-of.html)

 

An agile literature review on the topic of crime city

JOSEPH KIM-KEUNG HO

Independent Trainer

Hong Kong, China

Dated: March 29, 2021

 

 

Abstract: Literature review, done in an agile way, is useful to part-time degree students who have a busy pace of life. This article presents an account of an agile literature review exercise carried out by the writer on Crime City as a city image topic studied in the subject of Geographical Imagination (in the Undergraduate Degree programme in Housing Studies). It is argued that this agile method is helpful for intellectual learning in general and for mastering the literature review skill by part-time degree programme students as they need this skill to do course assignments and final year dissertation projects.

Key words: agile literature review exercise, crime city, intellectual learning, literature review.

 

 

Introduction

Literature review is a key topic to study in Research Methods in University Degree programmes. The writer is interested in the topic both for research and teaching purposes. In particular, the writer has been investigating on the topic of literature review method that is agile. Being agile as a literature review method is attractive to part-time undergraduate students as this method is more in sync with the busy rhythm of life of these students. This article has a straightforward aim of presenting an agile literature review exercise on the topic of Crime City[1] as a city image in the Geographical Imagination subject. This is the subject that the writer teaches to his part-time Housing Studies Degree students in Hong Kong. It serves as a useful reading to students interested in the topic of Crime City (in Geographical Imagination) and literature review (in the subject of Research Methods). The next section presents the account of this agile exercise, which is followed by a brief ‘concluding remarks” section.

 

The agile literature review exercise on Crime City

The literature review exercise adopts an agile mode, which endorses a nimble, evolutionary and responsive style of literature review and the concomitant intellectual learning. The whole exercise took the writer two days to perform, from March 27-28, 2021. The literature search made use of Google Scholar and two UK university e-libraries. The literature review direction is to gather useful academic ideas on Crime City as a city image topic to study in the subject of Geographical Imagination.  The literature review findings are shown in Table 1.

Table 1:  A set of gathered academic ideas related to Crime City, grouped in two categories

Categories	Academic ideas of Crime City
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.1]	“In their simplest form, place-based crime prevention strategies direct police to particular areas to identify and deter potential or motivated offenders located there (Kennedy et al., 2018; Lum & Koper, 2013). But this approach is incomplete if it relies only on saturating crime hot spots with law enforcement officers. Solving crime problems for the long-term requires more than punitive reactions to people present at these spots. Environmental criminology offers clues on how to change situations to make them less conducive to crime (Kennedy et al., 2018; Mastrofski et al., 2010)” (Caplan et al., 2021).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.2]	“Risk-based policing (RBP) encourages data-informed decisions following a process of problem definition, information gathering and analysis. It balances applications of traditional law enforcement activities focused on specific or general deterrence of people (Kennedy, 2006; Klinenberg, 2018; Sousa & Kelling, 2006; Taylor, 2001; Wilson & Kelling, 1982) with strategies for mitigating the attractive or generative qualities of places that enable illegal behaviors and situational contexts for crime to emerge or fester (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1995; Caplan et al., 2018; Cozens & Love, 2015; Zahm, 2007; Wikstr€om, 2010)” (Caplan et al., 2021).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.3]	“The relationships between crime and the conditions of city life are an important concern in urban sociology. Most early research on urban crime inquires where juvenile and adult offenders lived before apprehension in order to uncover the effects of city life on the development of criminal motivation and behavior. Much recent research is on the victim and deals with either the types of persons and households who become victims (Ennis; Skogan, b), or the types of places where crimes occur (Boggs; Schmid, a,b)” (Roncek, 1981).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.4]	“For Wirth and Simmel, the city produces an anonymous milieu which permits deviant behavior because informal social control is relatively weak. Newman's (a,b) and Jacobs' works reflect this view of an anonymous urban environment producing the conditions for deviant behavior, especially crime. Their concepts of "defensible space" and "eyes on the street" point to the way certain types of places in cities provide settings for crime by impeding observation and intervention.” (Roncek, 1981).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.5]	“The literature on the economics of crime is heavily influenced by Becker (Becker, 1968). In this seminal paper, he points out the amount of crime is a function of both the willingness to supply crime and the demand for security. If the profitability of crime increases, so too will the number of crimes” (Weber, 2019).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.6]	“The bulk of studies exploring the patterns of crime in small geographic units employ routine activities theory and its geographic corollary, crime patterning theory (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1984; Smith et al., 2000). Routine activities theory posits that crime events are more likely to occur with the convergence in time and place of motivated offenders and suitable targets along with a lack of guardians (Cohen and Felson, 1979; Felson and Boba, 2010), which implies that the ambient population at micro-locations during various hours of the day is important for understanding when and where crime is most likely to occur (Brantingham and Brantingham,1995; Roncek and Maier,1991)” (Hipp et al., 2017).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.7]	“Defined as a sense of insecurity as well, the fear of crime also is defined as “emotional reaction characterized by a sense of danger and anxiety generated by crime or symbols associated with crime” [6, 5, 10, 11]. Although closely related concepts, fear of crime is independent of crime [12] and many researches assert that fear of crime has become a major social and political problem, perhaps bigger than crime itself [13, 14]” (Tandogana and Ilhan, 2016).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.8]	“Fear of crime is widely accepted as a phenomenon and it leads to direct and indirect negative outcomes. Fewer people use streets; public spaces (park, squares etc.) are deserted; city services may not be used by the people who need them; stores in downtown centres may lose customers; and employers have a more limited pool/market of employees [18, 19]. This situation paves the way for deserted or abandoned urban spaces and city dwellers become dissatisfied [19]” (Tandogana and Ilhan, 2016).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.9]	“Social interactions models state that individual behaviors not only depend on the individual incentives but also on the behavior of peers and neighbors. An individual is more likely to commit crime if his peers commit than if they do not commit crime. These models are a natural way to explain the concentration of crime by area” (Zenou, 2003).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.10]	“We can also explain why crime is localized and concentrated in certain areas of the city by a different but complementary model (Freeman, Grogger, and Sonstelie 1996, Zenou 2002). When there are a lot of criminals in a certain area of a city, the probability of arrest will be relatively low so that criminals create a positive externality to each other. However, the proceeds of crime will also be relatively low since there are more criminals so that criminals also create a negative externality to each other. The decision to commit crime in a certain area will then depend on the trade off between the probability of arrest and the possible loot there (see also Deutsch, Hakim, and Weinblatt 1987, and Deutsch and Epstein 1998)” (Zenou, 2003).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.11]	“The connection between crime and city size is not a new fact. Criminologists have discussed the urban tendency toward crime for decades (see, e.g., Flango and Sherbenou [1976]; Schichor, Decker, and O’Brien [1979]; Larson [1984]; or two separate articles in Radzinowicz and Wolfgang [1977]). Wirth (1938) discusses the observed connection between crime and urbanization and argues that this connection is evidence for his theory of ‘‘urbanism as a way of life.’’ (Glaeser and Sacerdote, 1999).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.12]	“Cities may create greater returns to crime because criminals may have greater access to the wealthy and face a greater density of victims in urban areas. The connection between city size and value per crime is large (.13 in the victimization records and .09 in the UCR data)” (Glaeser and Sacerdote, 1999).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.13]	“Identifying the most appropriate measures for crime prevention in high crime areas will depend on perspectives that are used to explain crime. On the one hand, classical perspectives, which hold offenders responsible for their criminal actions, choose punitive policies for crime prevention. Incapacitation policies and the use of imprisonment are among the most commonly used policies in this perspective. Other perspectives, on the other hand, view criminality as an outcome of deficiencies in economic and social institutions, i.e. oppressive economic deprivation, inappropriate parental control and supervision, imbalanced educational system, etc.” (Tabrizia and Madanipour, 2006).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.14]	“Clarke and Eck (2005) have stated a larger rule of concentration, the 80–20 rule, which tells us that crime is highly concentrated among offenders, victims, or places. In particular, the highly unequal distribution of crime over urban space has been well documented. Approximately 5 % of street segments produce at least half the crime in several cities (Weisburd et al. 2012). Crime concentration tendencies have been shown strongly in Britain (Johnson 2010, 2014), Australia (Townsley et al. 2014), and the Netherlands (Bernasco and Luykx 2003). In addition, Andresen and Malleson (2013) observed crime concentrations at three spatial scales in the same city: street segments, CTs [census tracts], and dissemination areas   ….  crime concentrates in summer near major parks and beaches, but elsewhere in other seasons when visitor patterns differ” (Felson and Boivin, 2015).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.15]	“The rate of violent crime is one of the indicators of social tension in a community; violent crime rate is also one of the ecologic factors affecting community social health (Messner, 1989; Shalala, 1993; Shaw-Taylor, 1999)” (Shaw-Taylor, 2002).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.16]	“Just as a crime rate can be considered from a perspective which concentrates on offenders and their appropriate disposition, so it can be considered in terms of victims. Defining prevalence as the proportion of people who become victims and vulnerability as the number of victimizations per victim, then an area's crime incidence is a product (literally, in the arithmetical sense) of crime prevalence and vulnerability. In other words, just as an area may suffer much crime because of a few very active offenders or many less active offenders, so an area may suffer much crime because many people become victims once or because a few people are repeatedly victimized” (Trickett et al., 1992).
Category 1: ingredient concepts of Crime City [idea 1.17]	“An increase in public fear of crime is thought likely to impair quality of life by restricting individual movement, decreasing general sociability, reducing mutual trust, and impeding informal social controls, all of which may ultimately lead to public streets becoming even more dangerous (Conklin 1975; Hale 1996; McIntyre 1967). This is of particular concern in lower-income, inner-city neighbourhoods, which tend to experience higher rates of crime than suburban neighbourhoods (Fitzgerald, Wisener, and Savoie 2004)” (Kohm, 2009).
Category 2: application considerations of Crime City [idea 2.1]	“Jane Jacobs’s work (Jacobs, 1961) described the relationships between street layouts, diverse mix of land use and crime. She argued that a mixed-use neighborhood with residential, commercial, institutional and leisure would be safer than single functional areas as these areas ensure informal surveillance: “eyes on the streets.” Jeffery (1971) first brought up the phrase crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED). This strategy is currently applied in many cities such as London and Sydney (Cozens, 2011). In 1972, Oscar Newman’s (Newman, 1972) defensible space started to influence a generation of planners: he argued that poor design elements decrease residents’ willingness to use and defend local space” (Zhang et al., 2021).
Category 2: application considerations of Crime City [idea 2.2]	“Surveys and qualitative studies have confirmed that physical environments that are dark, lonely, unattractive, or uncared-for stimulate people’s fear (Warr, 1990; Vrij and and Winkel, 1991; Doran and Lees, 2005). More recently, researchers have leveraged the GIS to investigate the “spatial specific” aspects of fear of crime at a finer scale in cities (Liu and Eck, 2008). Doran and Burgess (2011) advocate the importance of crime-related fear mapping to provide an additional layer of understanding people’s “spatial choices.”..” (Zhang et al., 2021).
Category 2: application considerations of Crime City [idea 2.3]	“One particularly attractive feature of the conventionally-used crime rate is that it is easy to calculate, requiring only a measure of the number of crimes committed for its numerator, and a measure of the at-risk population for its denominator. While the validity of commonly-used numerators has often been the subject of debate among researchers, the typical denominator for the crime rate—the residential population of the area—has been questioned much less often. This could be a considerable oversight since the crime rate is intended to be a measure of the number of crimes relative to the number of persons at risk, and the population at risk in a given city can be quite different from the population that resides within it” (Stults  and Hasbrouck, 2015).
Category 2: application considerations of Crime City [idea 2.4]	“Women often report levels of fear of crime that are two to three times higher than men’s [24]. Due to their fears and safety anxiety, women and elderly take more precautionary behaviour and spend more time in safer places rather than public spaces and in return, they have less chance of being victimized. On the other hand, as men and young people have less fear of crime, they take less precautionary behaviours against crime and they spend more time outdoors and are more likely victim of crime [13, 25, 26]” (Tandogana and Ilhan, 2016).
Category 2: application considerations of Crime City [idea 2.5]	“A rich tradition of sociological and criminological studies has focused on the relationship between crime rates and the social and economic environment of macro-level units such as cities (e.g., Chamlin & Cochran, 1997; Liska & Bellair, 1995). Whereas much of this research has focused on the relationship between key socio-demographic characteristics and levels of crime at a single point in time in cities (Chamlin & Cochran, 1997; Sampson, 1987), a smaller body of research has explored how the economic environment and levels of crime can co-evolve (Ousey & Kubrin, 2009; Stults & Hasbrouck, 2015)” (Hipp and Kane, 2017).
Category 2: application considerations of Crime City [idea 2.6]	“For most of the twentieth century, U.S. cities— and their high-poverty neighborhoods in particular—were viewed as dangerous, crime ridden places that middle-class, mobile (and typically white) households avoided, fueling suburbanization. While some pundits and policy analysts bemoaned this urban flight, others voiced concern over the potential impact of crime-ridden environments on the urban residents who were left behind” (Ellen and O’Regan, 2009).

 

With reference to Table 1, a plethora of academic ideas have been identified by the agile literature review exercise. They are grouped into two categories, namely, the “ingredient concepts of Crime City” and the “application considerations of Crime City”.  A brief summary of these academic ideas is as follows:

On “ingredient concepts of Crime City”, the academic literature makes use of academic ideas such as: place-based prevention strategies, risk-based policing, the relationships between crime and the conditions of city life, defensive space and eyes on the street, the function of the amount of crime, patterns of crime, routine activities theory, fear of crime, social interactions models, the trade-off between the probability of arrest and the possible loot, the connection between crime and city size, returns to crime, perspectives to explain crime, crime concentration tendencies, indicators of social tension, an area’s crime incidence.

On “application considerations of Crime City”, examples of study topics include Geographic Information System (GIS) to study spatial specific aspects of fear of crime, conventionally-used crime rate, fear of crime level and gender, and urban flight.

The academic ideas on Crime City shown in Table 1 provide a highly enriched knowledge base to examine Crime City as a city image topic in the subject of Geographical Imagination.

 

Concluding remarks

By conducting the agile literature review on Crime City, the writer collects a set of academic ideas that allows learners to have a more complicated understanding of Crime City as a city image in the subject of Geographical Imagination (e.g. for Housing Studies students). This article has demonstrated how to conduct an agile literature review exercise and use it for intellectual learning purpose. Such literature review skill is helpful to part-time Undergraduate students for doing their course assignments and final year dissertation projects.

 

References

Caplan, J.M., Kennedy, L.W., Drawve, G. and Baughman, J.H. 2021. “Data-Informed and Place-Based Violent Crime Prevention: The Kansas City, Missouri Risk-Based Policing Initiative” Police Quarterly 0(0): 1–27.

Ellen, I.G. and O’Regan, K. 2009. “Crime and U.S. Cities: Recent Patterns and Implications” ANNALS, AAPSS, 626, November: 22-38.

Felson, M. and Boivin, R. 2015. “Daily crime flows within a city” Crime Sci  4(31): DOI 10.1186/s40163-015-0039-0.

Glaeser, E.L. and Sacerdote, B. 1999. “Why Is There More Crime in Cities?” Journal of Political Economy 107(6) pt. 2: S225-S258.

Hipp, J.R. and Kane, K. 2017. “Cities and the larger context: What explains changing levels of crime?” Journal of Criminal Justice 49: 32–44.

Hipp, J.R., Wo, J.C. and Kim, Y.A. 2017. “Studying neighborhood crime across different macro spatial scales: The case of robbery in 4 cities” Social Science Research 68:  15-29.

Kohm, S.A. 2009. “Spatial Dimensions of Fear in a High-Crime Community: Fear of Crime or Fear of Disorder?” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice January: doi:10.3138/cjccj.51.1.1.

Roncek, D.W. 1981. “Dangerous Places: Crime and Residential Environment” Social Forces Sep. 60(1): 74-96.

Shaw-Taylor, Y. 2002. “Change in Violent Crime in the 100 Largest Cities of the US: 1980 – 2000” Cities 19(2): 123–128.

Stults, B.J. and Hasbrouck, M. 2015. “The Effect of Commuting on City-Level Crime Rates” J Quant Criminol  31: 331–350.

Tabrizia, L.R. and Madanipour, A. 2006. “Crime and the city: Domestic burglary and the built environment in Tehran” Habitat International 30: 932–944.

Tandogana, O. and Ilhan, B.S. 2016. “Fear of Crime in Public Spaces: From the View of Women Living in Cities” Procedia Engineering 161: 2011–2018.

Trickett, A., Osborn, D.R., Seymour, J. and Pease, K. 1992. “What is different about high crime areas?” Brit. J. Criminol. 32(1) Winter: 81-89.

Weber, B.S. 2019. “Uber and urban crime” Transportation Research Part A 130: 496–506.

Zenou, Y. 2003. “The spatial aspects of crime” Journal of the European Economic Association April–May 1(2–3): 459 – 467.

Zhang, F., Fan, Z.Y., Kang, Y.H., Hu, Y.J. and Ratti, C. 2021. “Perception bias”: Deciphering a mismatch between urban crime and perception of safety” Landscape and Urban Planning 207. 104003.

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[1] In this article, a crime city is defined as a city perceived to possess a high crime rate, thus a dangerous place.