Explaining Crime in Metropolitan and Non-Metropolitan Communities

Abstract

Traditional urban theories of community crime development increasingly are being adapted and evaluated for their relevance to the crime problems of smaller and less urban settings. Most notable of these have been social disorganization theory and civic community theory. This paper compares these two major theoretical frameworks for explaining community-level variations in crime, using county-level data on crime rates merged with data on the economic, geographic, population, and ecological features of counties in the U.S. The study finds that both traditional social disorganization and civic community theories are good predictors of some, but not all, types of crime, in the largest metropolitan areas. However, their predictive power declines substantially when applied to the most rural communities.

Social Disorganization and Rural/Urban Crime Rates: A County Level Comparison of Contributing Factors

“…Some findings indicated a relationship between population and crime rates in rural areas (Freudenberg & Jones, 1991;Jobes, 1999;Osgood & Chambers, 2000, Wells & Weisheit, 2004Bouffard & Muftić, 2006). Other studies, however, did not (Wells & Weisheit, 2012). Osgood and Chambers (2000) found population did not affect violent crime among juveniles in areas that contained over 4,000 juveniles.…”

“…Unemployment generally predicted more crime (Osgood & Chambers, 2000;Bouffard & Muftić, 2006). However, poverty, low socioeconomic status, and income inequality have not produced a significant effect on crime rates in rural models (Petee & Kowalski, 1993;Osgood & Chambers, 2000;Wells & Weisheit, 2004, Wells & Weisheit, 2012, while Bouffard and Muftić (2006) even found crime generally increased with lower rates of poverty. While this relationship may be perplexing, as Weisheit and Wells (1996) alluded to, poverty may play a different role in rural communities.…”

“…Results from Shaw and McKay's (1929) study of delinquent youth were consistent among all observed ethnic groups, indicating that community dynamics and structural conditions yield high levels of social disorganization, which leads to crime. Social disorganization theory was widely abandoned during the 1950's after facing criticism that the theory was too unique to the characteristics of Chicago (Wells & Weisheit, 2012). Examining the efficacy of social disorganization through a meta-analysis, Pratt and Cullen (2005) found support for the following variables: socioeconomic status, urbanism, racial heterogeneity, residential mobility, family disruption, unsupervised local peer groups, and collective efficacy.…”

How Rural Criminology Informs Critical Thinking in Criminology

“…Simply put, the results from Wells and Weisheit (2012) and most of the other research cited above indicates that the theory is less than generalisable beyond the concentric circles of cities and suburbs (Jobes et al 2004). This is significant because although it is commonly assumed that a large urban locality exhibits greater diversity in its demographic characteristics, it can be argued with equal force that there is greater diversity between rural places than between urban neighbourhoods.…”

“…Other rural-focused research has found this same distinctive pattern (Bouffard and Muftić 2006;Jobes et al 2004;Kaylen and Pridemore 2013), indicating a limitation to the generalisability of social disorganisation theory. Wells and Weisheit (2012) completed a comparative statistical analysis of violent and property crime rates for nearly 3,000 counties in the United States, using sets of independent variables traditionally adopted for testing social disorganisation theory (as measured by population instability, racial heterogeneity, poverty and family instability), plus civic community theory (as measured by owner-occupied housing, church membership, voting rates). The social disorganisation variables were better predictors than the civic community factors across all four types of US counties in their analysis, which included metropolitan counties (counties with a city of >50,000) and three kinds of non-metropolitan counties based on the size of their largest city or town, but none with a place larger than 50,000 persons.…”