Recent studies point to the potential theoretical and practical benefits of focusing police resources on crime hot spots. However, many scholars have noted that such approaches risk displacing crime or disorder to other places where programs are not in place. Although much attention has been paid to the idea of displacement, methodological problems associated with measuring it have often been overlooked. We try to fill these gaps in measurement and understanding of displacement and the related phenomenon of diffusion of crime control benefits. Our main focus is on immediate spatial displacement or diffusion of crime to areas near the targeted sites of an intervention. Do focused crime prevention efforts at places simply result in a movement of offenders to areas nearby targeted sites—“do they simply move crime around the corner”? Or, conversely, will a crime prevention effort focusing on specific places lead to improvement in areas nearby—what has come to be termed a diffusion of crime control benefits? Our data are drawn from a controlled study of displacement and diffusion in Jersey City, New Jersey. Two sites with substantial street‐level crime and disorder were targeted and carefully monitored during an experimental period. Two neighboring areas were selected as “catchment areas” from which to assess immediate spatial displacement or diffusion. Intensive police interventions were applied to each target site but not to the catchment areas. More than 6,000 20‐minute social observations were conducted in the target and catchment areas. They were supplemented by interviews and ethnographic field observations. Our findings indicate that, at least for crime markets involving drugs and prostitution, crime does not simply move around the corner. Indeed, this study supports the position that the most likely outcome of such focused crime prevention efforts is a diffusion of crime control benefits to nearby areas.

Surveys are commonly used in the field of criminology and criminal justice; however, the effects of survey design on study findings are rarely examined. Using a randomized experiment, this study examined the effects of question order in a victimization survey on respondents' perceptions of safety. The interactions between respondents' characteristics and question-order effects were also explored. The simple question-order effect was not found for the overall sample, but further examination revealed that respondent characteristics such as sex and victim status interact with the arrangement of questions. The implications of the findings for victimization survey research, and more generally for studies using surveys as a primary tool, are discussed.

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Objectives: Disorder has been measured by various data sources; however, little attention has been given to comparing the construct validity of different measures obtained through various methods in capturing social disorder and related phenomena. Methods: The multitrait-multimethod approach was used to triangulate the consistency between social disorder, prostitution and drug activity across resident surveys, systematic social observations, and police calls for service data. Results: Prostitution and drug activity showed convergent validity, while there was little evidence that social disorder was consistently measured across the three methods. None of the three social problem measures showed high discriminant validity. Drug activity seems to have highest trait-specific discriminant validity across measures, and prostitution is the most identifiable measure across data sources. Social disorder was found to have low discriminant validity. However, the agreement between databases varies across the type of social problems. Conclusions: Social disorder appears to the most difficult concept to define and measure consistently. The lack of correspondence across data sources cautions against the use of a single source of information in studying disorder. Future studies should explore the factors that shape perceptions of disorder and how to best measure disorder to test the broken windows thesis and related concepts.

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