Block Crime and Fear: Defensible Space, Local Social Ties, and Territorial Functioning

Space–time interaction of residential burglaries in Wuhan, China

“…However, traditional hotspots studies suffer from some important limitations. First, theoretical explanations of underlying causes of hotspots have not been fully developed, even though efforts have been made to establish the linkage between hotspots and various theories such as social disorganization (Taylor, Gottfredson, & Brower, 1984). Second, traditional approaches to identifying and analyzing crime hotspots often emphasize merely on the spatial element of crime but fail to jointly examining the spatial and temporal aspects of crime.…”

Where Broken Windows Should Be Fixed

“…Obviously, there is no a priori reason why the spatiotemporal spreading of disorder and crime would stop at the border of an administrative area. Nevertheless, many urban sociologists and criminologists have investigated BWT in a priori defined administrative areal units at a range of different scales, such as street (face) blocks (see, e.g., Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg 2008;Perkins and Taylor 1996;Robinson et al 2003;Taylor, Gottfredson, and Brower 1984) or block groups (Yang 2010), neighborhoods, neighborhood clusters, and census tracts (e.g., Sampson and Raudenbush 1999;Skogan 1990;Wilcox et al 2004), and even cities or counties (Gau and Pratt 2010;Xu, Fiedler, and Flaming 2005).…”

Community Design and Crime: The Impact of Housing and the Built Environment

“…Taylor, Gottfredson, and Brower (1984) examined residents' reports of fear of crime and police calls for service data. Measures of defensible space of households on 63 blocks were correlated with social ties and neighborhood identification, elements that research suggests may foster informal social controls (Sampson 2012).…”