The Criminology of Place

The study of crime has focused primarily on why particular people commit crime or why specific communities have higher crime levels than others. This book presents a new and different way of looking at the crime problem by examining why specific streets in a city have specific crime trends over time. Based on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of crime in Seattle, Washington, the book focuses our attention on small units of geographic analysis-micro communities, defined as street segments. Half of all Seattle crime each year occurs on just 5–6% of the city's street segments, yet these crime hot spots are not concentrated in a single neighborhood and street by street variability is tremendous. This book sets out…