Collective efficacy and violent crime in suburban housing estates

Abstract

Collective efficacy theory states that neighbourhood variation in crime can be attributed to social cohesion and informal social control. Despite a substantial body of work, the theory has been subject to little testing in Europe and few studies have compared different outcomes. The current study employed a cluster sampling design to study violent crime in a sample of 70 suburban housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s throughout Finland. Police-recorded violent crime in public and private space and survey-based measures of neighbourhood violence were studied using register data on neighbourhood characteristics and the residents' perceptions of social cohesion and perceived capacity for informal control. The results showed that, in a sample of Finnish suburban housing estates, collective efficacy was negatively associated with violence in private space and a survey-based measure of neighbourhood violence, while the association between collective efficacy and violence in public space was not significant. Neighbourhood disadvantage was directly associated with police-recorded violence in private surroundings but not violence in the public sphere.

Inequality in Exposure to Crime, Social Disorganization and Collective Efficacy: Evidence from Greater Manchester, United Kingdom

“…The analysis considers both violent and nuisance crimes. Violent crime has been the subject of previous studies of social disorganisation in both US and European cities (Peterson et al 2000;Sampson et al 2013;Wikström 2008;Wikström et al 2012;Sutherland et al 2013;Danielsson, 2019) and thus, its assessment here, enables benchmarking with this body of work. We also assess nuisance crime as we expect socially organised neighbourhoods (those with greater collective efficacy capabilities) to be able to exert greater informal control over less severe offences (Warner and Clubb 2013).…”

“…As a final consideration, existing research has found that the association between the characteristics of social disorganisation and crime differs according to the measure of crime utilised (Klinger and Bridges 1997;Slocum et al 2013). Survey-based measures of crime, in contrast to police recorded crime, have more consistently shown that the structural characteristics of communities correlate with crime rates (Danielsson 2019).…”