Searching for the Determinants of Crime at the Community Level

Robert J. Sampson and W. Byron Groves (1989) analyzed data from 238 British neighborhoods to test the mediating effect of indicators of social disorganization. Basing their work on that of Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay (1942), these researchers created indicators such as friendship networks, organizational participation, and the control of street-corner teenaged peer groups, and developed a theory of community level. In this article, we apply the formal logic of Sampson and Groves using data from the fi rst Belo Horizonte victimization survey. In addition, we use data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and the Military Police. The results support the social disorganization theory and demonstrate that crime-rate differences are an effect of community level. Crime and violence have become more prevalent in Brazil since their marked increase in the 1980s, primarily in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and in the 1990s in other large cities such as Belo Horizonte. Although the city of São Paulo has experienced a sharp reduction in homicide rates in recent years (Goertzel and Khan 2009), violent crimes, especially property crimes, still have extremely high levels. Not only the media but also offi cial statistics have demonstrated that criminality has increased signifi cantly in large cities in recent years. While in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s the public pointed to crime as one of the most severe social problems, in Brazil a survey conducted by the Confederação Nacional dos Transportes in 2010 showed that almost 23 percent of Brazilians elected urban violence as the major social problem to be tackled, followed by the problem of drugs (21.2 percent) and unemployment (19 percent) (CNT/SENSUS, 2010). Recent analyses have confi rmed the rise of victimization in urban centers (Beato, Peixoto, and Andrade 2004). This reality is evident when we observe that most individuals lock their homes and have constructed high walls and strengthened all of the forms of home security. Today, in the large urban centers, the home has become the best model of a fortress that one can imagine (Paixão 1991; Caldeira 2000). This generalized fear has made many Brazilians prisoners in their own homes, resulting in social behaviors of suspicion and isolation (Silva and Beato Filho 2013). In Brazilian society, increasing crime has also fostered the demand by civil society for a defi ned public security policy. This Brazilian phenomenon is not new; other countries have confronted the same problem. When adopted, primarily in less developed countries, such public policies have not been guided by systemP6498.indb 218 9/24/14 9:09:49 AM SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION AND CRIME 219 atic studies on crime, and the appropriate follow-up on the implemented policies has not occurred. The United States and England are exceptions. There, scholars have been discussing the origins of crime for a long time, and the anticrime policies that have been adopted are based on criminological theories and criminal analysis. In modern criminology, an important tradition of studies has shown the existence of geographic patterns of crime. The occurrence of crimes, as well as the concentration of criminals and victims, follows patterns that manifest themselves differently in space and time (Beato 2012; Bursik and Webb 1982; Brantingham and Brantingham 1981; Sherman, Gartin, and Buerguer 1989). The evidence of the spatial-temporal distribution of urban crime has driven research not only to prove the existence of these patterns but fundamentally to understand the processes that produce them. Thus, the debate on the phenomenon of crime has moved from approaches that emphasize individual or psychological elements, such as genetic abnormalities or personal predispositions, to structural levels of explanation. These studies identify certain properties of community structures as determinants of patterns of crime distribution, which in turn characterize some places or neighborhoods as violent and dangerous. Ecological studies are among those looking to associate the structural characteristics of neighborhoods with the occurrence of crimes. The concentration of poverty, urban segregation, and residential instability are, according to these studies, elements that are ecologically concentrated and strongly correlated to the phenomenon of crime. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND One of the most important ecological approaches in sociology to the study of crime and delinquency originates in the research of the Chicago school, specifi cally in the work of Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay (1942). They investigated the relationship between the social organization of neighborhoods (or communities) and the process of growth of large cities. In particular, these scholars sought to understand why high rates of delinquency persisted in certain areas for many years, independent of changes in the composition of the population. According to their theory, crime appeared in communities characterized by social disorganization and was perpetuated through a process of cultural transmission whereby the traditions were passed from generation to generation. Shaw and McKay affi rmed that three structural factors—low socioeconomic status, ethnic heterogeneity, and residential mobility—disrupt a community’s social organization, which in turn explains the spatial variations in the rates of crime and delinquency. Thus the community, treated as a small area in the interior of the urban space, became the unit of analysis of the environmental sociologist in the search for the causes of crime in large cities. From the 1950s until the 1980s, social disorganization theory was the target of substantial criticism, resulting in its abandonment as a viable explanation for empirical studies of crime. These criticisms were focused on the utility and capacP6498.indb 219 9/24/14 9:09:50 AM 220 Latin American Research Review ity of macro-level interpretation, the assumed stability in the standards for urban land use, and the measurement of social disorganization as a construct independent of that construct’s outcome (Veysey and Messner 1999). However, social disorganization theory has received attention from researchers in recent decades with the advance of computer-based statistical techniques and new methodologies and theoretical approaches. At the end of the 1980s, Robert J. Sampson and W. Byron Groves followed the principles and logic of the original theory of Shaw and McKay while also relying on more recent work concerning the ecology of crime to construct a theoretical explanation of crime at the community level. Sampson and Groves (1989) tested the mediating effect of what they term the “intervening dimensions of social disorganization” in relation to the structural characteristics of the community, or “exogenous sources of social disorganization,” and crime rates. For Sampson and Groves, the structural characteristics of a community, such as urbanization and degree of family disruption, affect the capacity of the community to impose informal and formal controls on its members and outsiders. This inability to exert social control is refl ected in the direct indicators of social disorganization, including friendship networks, involvement in organizations, and the supervision of teenaged peer groups. Reduction in the mechanisms of social control and, consequently, increase in social disorganization result in high crime rates. Social disorganization, in this case, emphasizes the inability of “a community structure to realize common values of its residents and to keep the effective social control” (Sampson and Groves 1989, 777). This results in weakened social bonds, poor internal control, and limited institutional capacity to access external resources (Berry and Kasarda 1977). Since then, several studies have sought to test the explanatory power of the theory of social disorganization in varied urban contexts. For Bursik and Grasmick (1993), the local community, or neighborhood, should be understood as a complex relational system made up of family and friends as well as formal and informal associative ties formed through the socialization process prevailing in the neighborhood. In this regard, variations in the ability of neighborhoods to regulate and control themselves explain the differential rates of criminal behavior and victimization among neighborhoods. By highlighting that the main defi ciency of the original model of social disorganization is the failure to consider the role of the public sphere of local control, Bursik and Grasmick propose a systemic theory in which lower levels of crime and violence stem from greater effectiveness of a community to negotiate with external agencies, such as the police or city offi cials. It is these inter-institutional connections that in turn are capable of maximizing decisions taken internally by the local residents (Bursick and Grasmick 1993; Sampson 2012). Along this same line of reasoning, Sampson and his colleagues developed a new theoretical approach in which local social control depends on the level of “collective effi cacy” present to solve the community problems (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997). The basic premise of this concept is that social and organizational characteristics of neighborhoods explain variations in rates of crimes that should not be attributed only to aggregated demographic characteristics of P6498.indb 220 9/24/14 9:09:50 AM SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION AND CRIME 221 individuals. Indeed, the lowest crime rates would be the result of neighborhood environments in which the residents share common values and at the same time act to control local activities. Higher levels of informal social control of the neighborhood are exercised when there is greater social cohesion and trust among its residents, that is, more collective effi cacy. Thus, collective effi cacy is a resource differentially available among communities, and it is activated at the crucial and specifi c moment for social control. Furthermore, it is important to note that collective effi cacy is much more than the accumulation of individual properties. The theoretical orientation of the concept consists in shared expectations for action, which is potentially activated to perform specifi c tasks in conditions of mutual trust and social cohesion. In a community context where the rules are unclear and external resources capable of supporting the community are lacking, the possibility of fi nding people predisposed to intervene is minimal. Thus, this could lead to the emergence of what Elliott and colleagues (1996) call “illegitimate opportunity structures and dysfunctional lifestyles” or, more precisely, an enabling environment for “alternative behavioral strategies” (Cohen and Machaleck 1988), with low capacity to exercise effective collective local control.