through 1971 and tracked through official criminal records over approximately 25 years. q A comparison group of 667 children, not officially recorded as abused or neglected, matched to the study group according to sex, age, race, and approximate family socioeconomic status.

Residents in four Chicago neighborhoods were surveyed to determine the rela tionship between fear of crime and official crime rates. Several anomalies were found. Citizens' perceptions of dangerous areas in their neighborhoods match, for the most part, official records of crimes committed there. However, assessments of neighborhoods' specific crime problems and personal risks do not consistently cor respond with official statistics. The authors argue that citizens' perceptions of crime are shaped not so much by the neighborhood conditions reflected in the crime statistics, but rather by the level of incivility in their communities. Indicators of incivility are conditions, more frequently confronted, indicating that community social control is weak. These include abandoned buildings, vandalism, drug use, and loitering teenagers. The authors demonstrate the correspondence between levels of fear and concern about incivility. They suggest that fear of crime is trig gered by a broad range of neighborhood conditions, and argue that attempts to understand and control that fear should look beyond serious crime incidents as the sole source of the problem.

This paper presents a critical examination of homicide circumstances as reported in supplementary homicide reports (SHR). Different types of homicides can be distinguished by the circumstance codes and victim/offender relationship recorded on the SHR. Delineating murder by type invites analysis of this offense from a victimization perspective–homicides have much in common with nonlethal offenses. Different types of homicide present different policy problems to police. The paper also discusses various sources of error in SHR data, which must be recognized by researchers interested in theoretical or policy questions.

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