“Social Change And Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity

This reading has made it apparent that throughout history, the perspective of crime has changed based on the consensus of the people during the given time period. Over the course of human civilization we have evolved and adopted new ideologies in regards to what crime is. In earlier civilization crime and their punishment were regarded in more barbaric terms, the severity of crimes were different from those of today and the punishments were in some ways more logical. We as a civilization did not go into much depth for example the crime of murder would often time be expected to be followed by vengeance on a given individual and revenge of a murder would follow by the death of a criminal. This punishment was expected in those time but as time progressed the perspective of crime has changed which went hand in hand with the change in punishment.

1990 was a year with high murder crime rates in New York city. While crime such as assault drop. Car theft and burgarly was at an all time high , and burglary and larcency drop. The public was in a state of fear and the state of New York devise a plan to make one thousands officers available to patrol and keep the citizians out of harms way. Even tho the state had p[olice offercers on hand people did not seek help. It is documented that reportings drop to 30% where as the year before it was 80%. Researches could not understand how myders rose but crimes that usually happen at the same time as muders declined. 1990 was a year that murder and robbery was up across the the united states. 1990 New York record of murder is 2,245 while back in

Crime displacement and diffusion is a major concern in the United States. Crime neither seem to be increasing nor decrease throughout the years. Displacement brings more consequences and can occur when a harm is produced by displacement crime before the intervention. There are three theories that help explain why crime are committed, who are targeted and how to prevent from being a potential target. Being aware of your surroundings is extremely important. Analyzing offenders, victims and location can give ideas as to why crimes occurs. Giving displacement and diffusion central attention should be the center to problem solving in criminal activities.

Firstly, they provide evidence that deviant behaviour can be explained through the ecological theory of crime. Each aspect and moral order response offers a unique explanation for why crime and deviance continues to be a pervasive force in certain neighbourhoods. In addition, the interrelatedness of each aspect allows for a logical flow between propositions that explains why deviance is so widespread. For example, the proposition, “Stigmatized neighbourhoods will suffer from more lenient law enforcement,” is essential in establishing the importance of the proposition, “More lenient law enforcement increases the incidence of crime and deviance” (Stark 1987: 172). Secondly, the author’s argument is furthering the ecology of crime, meaning that one cannot simply examine environmental factors of crime and deviance but also identify and analyze the types of responses that individuals have in relation to these factors. As previously mentioned, the four responses are moral cynicism, increased opportunities for crime, increased motivation to deviate, and diminished social control (Stark: 1987). Identifying these four responses is important to the author’s argument because neighbourhoods are not static and abstract entities but spaces that are continuously acted upon by social actors and forces. To just examine structural or environmental factors is to ignore how humans living in these

The 1990s in the United States were marked by the incredible drop in crime, a decline in both property crime, and violent crime. The phenomenon was confirmed as “real” versus an artifact of reporting by data generated from the National Victimization Survey (Zimring, 2007). Reasons for the precipitous drop in crime could be because of a booming economy in the United States, and that booming economy certainly accounted for some of the drop-in crime. Incarceration rates also increased in the late 1990s and throughout the 1990s and likely contributed to the drop-in crime (Zimring, 2007).

Since it appears that the vast majority of the offenders are rational, crimes almost always happen at some specific areas, places or regions and are rarely randomly distributed, if not never. This phenomenon is well introduced in the crime pattern theory (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1981, 1984, 1993) which intersects the rational theory, routine activity theory and crime pattern theory. In crime pattern theory, both offenders and victim have their own behavior patterns consisting of the same or different activity places. Crimes are more likely to happen in these intersected activity places. Iron Law of Troublesome Places (Wilcox and Eck, 2011) simply indicates that few places (roughly 20%) are responsible for most of problems (roughly 80%),

Crime rates have moved in parallel in Western social orders subsequent to the late Middle Ages. Murder rates declined from 20 to 100 for every 100,000 populace in Western Europe to one for every 100,000 in most Western nations by the start of the twentieth century. Crime rates in real urban communities and in nations tumbled from the mid nineteenth century until the center of the twentieth. From the 1960s to the 1990s, rates for savage and property crimes ascended in all well off Western nations. From that point forward, rates in all have fallen precipitately for murder, thievery, auto robbery, and other property crimes. The examples show up in both police and exploitation information. Rates for nonlethal roughness have fallen forcefully in the English-talking nations and parts of mainland Europe. In different parts of Europe, nonlethal viciousness has been steady or expanding, however the information are most likely off-base.

Many studies have been developed on how to prevent crimes from occurring or what are the ways to stop the criminal acts. Guerette & Bowers (2009), they examined and evaluate situational crime prevention techniques which classified by Clarke and Cornish, to determine if the crime displacement and crime diffusion is effective in offending criminal acts. Many critics argued about the effectiveness of crime displacement in offending crimes because of the limited studies about it. Displacement as defined by Guerette & Bowers, it is the relocation of a crime from one place, time, target, offense, tactic, or offender to another as a result of some crime-prevention initiative and crime diffusion is the opposite of crime displacement (Guerette & Bowers, 2009). For this reason, Guerette & Bowers

Displacement is the response of offenders to the crime prevention strategies, especially the ones that block criminal opportunities (Barr and Pease, 1990; Eck, 1993). Besides the most intelligible displacement, the change in the location of crimes (spatial displacement), researchers proposed five other types of displacements, which are: temporal displacement, target (victim) displacement, method displacement, crime type displacement, and perpetrator (offender) displacement (Reppetto, 1976; Garbor, 1990; Barr and Pease, 1990; Eck, 1993). Table 1 shows these six forms of displacements and their distinctions, as well as examples.

There are many offenders that commit crimes near their homes or in similar familiar areas. The author demonstrated that offenders are more likely to commit commercial robberies in their former residential areas than in otherwise similar areas they never lived in (2014). Robbery is any burglary or attempted embezzlement in a through conflict with the victim by influence or the risk of force or violence. When a robbery occurs, the offender chooses not to return to the location that they became the suspect in the robbery. The study shows that “the distances between offender homes and robbery locations within their own census block of residence was approximated by half the square root of the census block surface, which is about the average distance between two random points in a rectangle of the same size as the block surface” (Bernasco, Block,

Understanding and Controlling Hot Spots of Crime: The Importance of Formal and Informal Social Controls

According to Cohen and Felson, the founders of the routine activities theory, believed that the routine activity theory is an attempt to identify, at a macro-level, criminal activities and their patterns through explanation of changes in crime rate trends. (Cohen & Felson, 1979). Crime during the World War II era was so bad mainly due to the poverty of many Americans. Also, another contributor to why crime trends grew dramatically was due to women joining the workforce and vulnerability was in question. Suitable targets are influenced by the criminal’s perception of vulnerability based on gender and social status to name a few.

In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of crime‐related commodities such as security alarms, crime related television programs, and general merchandise. This essay will explore the commodification of crime by critically examining rising crime rates, increasing sales of crime‐associated and targeted products during the period when crime increases only slightly are explained as capitalism 's ability to form commodities from both social problems and deviance. Using secondary data, this essay will describe these crime trends and the consumption of crime commodities . Although the media quite clearly contribute to increasing concerns about victimization while crime was stable, the process of commodity exchange for crime goods is far from simply a media‐induced phenomenon . This essay uses a critical approach to analyse these conflicting developments and will attempt to show the commodification of crime is exploited by capitalism with particular focus on the commodification of sex crimes.

Looking at the trajectory of spatial criminology, the focus has been progressively moving towards smaller and smaller units of analysis of micro-places which looks at the discrete location of the crime, street intersections, or street segments. This is exemplified through the several theories of spatial criminology, including routine activity theory, geometric theory, and the rational choice theory. Stating that criminal activities occur when a motivated offender converges at a discrete location with a suitable target is the theory of routine activity theory. When looking at criminal events from the view of routine activity theory, the community can be too broad for the study of certain crimes and therefore, it can be necessary to analyze

In the past, those who study crime have focused on the offenders instead of crime itself; but this is beginning to change by “shifting the focus from a preoccupation with offenders to a detailed analysis of criminal events and criminal activities” (Kleemans et al, 2012, p. 87). Those under this following believe “that crime can be prevented by keeping motivated offenders away from suitable targets at specific points in time or space by increasing the presence of capable guardians” (Kleemans et al, 2012, p. 87). Each type of crime has different motives and desires and can be studied in a situational way. Several had tried this approach with organized crime activity treating it as sets of events and developing the following concepts: