NCJ Number
85387
Date Published
1981
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This analysis of data from Dallas, Tex., provides modest support for the hypothesis that the accessibility of a neighborhood to areas where criminals are likely to live increases the crime rate in the neighborhood.
Abstract
While a neighborhood's local demographic composition provides a good statistical explanation for its violent crime rate, its property crime rate is better understood in terms of the demographic composition of surrounding neighborhoods. Potentials of total population, teenage population, and poor families are computed with various distance-decay exponents. Neighborhood crime rates are most highly correlated with potentials with the highest distance-decay exponents. This suggests that the journey to crime is highly sensitive to distance. When a neighborhood's wealth, local proportion of poor, and poverty potential are included in a multiple regression, variations in both property crime and violent crime rates are highly sensitive to variations in poverty potential. These results provide credence to the hypothesis that changes in metropolitan structure have contributed to both the suburbanization of crime and its democratization. Improvements in intrametropolitan mobility and the suburbanization of the poor have increased the chances of victimization of the middle class. The crime rate in a neighborhood can rise as a resultof the entry of lower-status families in a neighborhood several miles away. This creates a turnover in higher-status families, which are likely to be replaced by lower-status families, thus increasing the likelihood that the remaining higher-status families will become crime victims. Turnover is further precipitated, and the fabric of the neighborhood unravels. (Author summary modified)