One of the key observations of delinquency research – that adolescents are more likely to offend during the time spent in the company of peers and without adult supervision – has been supported by recent studies following Situational Action Theory (SAT). According to SAT, exposure to criminogenic settings may influence adolescent behaviour by presenting opportunities and frictions; however, the outcome is seen as conditional on individual crime propensities and the moral context in which opportunities and frictions are encountered. To what extent the behaviour of adolescents in these settings also depends on the delinquent inclinations of their peers is an additional question that has received less attention. In the current study, we use data from a recent German school survey, including network data and a direct measurement of delinquent friends, to test for interactions between unstructured socializing and the crime propensities of respondents, as well as of their friends, and find support for SAT. In this context the measurement of ‘delinquent friends’ becomes important because its association with an adolescent’s own delinquency is likely to be overestimated when respondents report on their friends’ behaviour. The novel contribution of this study is to analyse how the interplay between these factors changes if one moves from an indirect to a direct measurement of friends’ delinquency. We show that the influence of situations and opportunities is unduly diminished when using the indirect measurement.

Predictive policing has become an important issue in recent times, and different applications have been implemented in different countries. With a remarkable increase in residential burglaries in Germany during the last years, several placebased predictive policing strategies have been applied for this type of offence. In the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, the "pilot project predictive policing" (P4) was started in October 2015. The project was designed to produce open-ended and unbiased results and therefore included an external scientific evaluation. The article describes how predictive policing was applied in the P4 pilot and summarizes the main findings of the evaluation study. As predictive policing is more than making predictions, the article sheds light on different aspects of a "prediction-led policing business process" (Perry et al., Predictive policing: the role of crime forecasting in law enforcement operations, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 2013). Despite some positive findings, the impact on crime remains unclear and the size of crime reducing effects appears to be moderate. Within the police force, the acceptance of predictive policing is a divisive issue. Future research is recommended.

Although urban disorder has played a central role in neighborhood research, its impact may have been overstated in studies relying on the subjective perception of survey respondents only. Research on the “perception bias”—defined as the divergence between respondents’ subjective assessments and systematic observations of disorder—has revealed the ambiguous nature of disorder and opened a door to the analysis of the social construction of this environmental cognition. Using survey and observational data from 140 small neighborhoods in two German cities, we advance this research by focusing on the moderating role of residents’ interethnic contacts and attitudes. The results show that the effects of neighborhood minority concentration on the perception bias are conditional on the residents’ interethnic contacts and xenophobic attitudes. These findings highlight the subjectivity of disorder perceptions and caution against a naive understanding of Broken Windows theory.

In neighborhood research, the concept of collective efficacy has been particularly successful in capturing social cohesion and behavioral expectations among residents. Research has spread beyond the U.S. where it originated, and many studies from different countries have shown that collective efficacy is related to structural disadvantage in similar ways and affects outcomes as crime, education or health. However, methodological issues about measurement and modeling persist, and no study has yet investigated the cross-cultural measurement equivalence of this scale. We close this gap using two recent neighborhood surveys from Australia and Germany with large samples of respondents (N = ca. 12.800) and neighborhoods (N = ca. 440) in four cities. We employ multilevel structural equation modeling to test for measurement equivalence of collective efficacy across countries and to model its association with concentrated poverty, ethnic diversity, and residential stability. We find that the measurement of collective efficacy is metrically equivalent in both countries, modeling two latent factors on the respondent level-the two components informal social control and social cohesion/trust-but only one latent factor on the neighborhood level. Considering the relationship between the key correlates of collective efficacy, we find broad similarities but also substantial differences across contexts and compared to U.S. research, particularly concerning the role of ethnic diversity which has a stronger diminishing effect in Germany than in Australia. Possible explanations for these differences are discussed.

Disorder and Perceptions of Insecurity in Urban Neighbourhoods -The Overrated Role of "Broken Windows" and the Challenge of Ethnic DiversityAbstract According to the "broken windows"-approach, signs of physical and social disorder in public spaces are a major cause of insecurity perceptions and the subsequent decline of urban neighbourhoods. Yet, the empirical support is weak as many studies have relied on subjective perceptions of disorder which are closely correlated with fear of crime. Using independent and systematic social observations we investigate the individual and ecological factors influencing the 'perception bias' of disorder, and ask how strong the impact of disorder on fear actually is. Our analyses are based on a survey of ca 6500 respondents and systematic social observations in 140 neighbourhoods in Cologne and Essen. We show that both the perception of disorder and fear of crime are mainly driven by the percentage of visible minorities. For the first time, we show that this effect is strongly dependent on individual attitudes towards migration. Only in one city, Essen, does the amount of systematically observed disorder have a fear-inducing effect over and above the effect of ethnic diversity. These results highlight the challenges of increased migration for social cohesion, and at the same time pinpoint at the importance of social contexts for the impact of social problems on feelings of insecurity.

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