How does community context matter? Social mechanisms and the explanation of crime rates

Abstract

The idea of “community” is at once compelling and frustrating. Indeed, few would disagree that at some fundamental level a community's social context matters for crime. Yet the concept is sufficiently vague that it risks becoming meaningless – if community context is all things to all people then it is simply a metaphor with no real explanatory power. What is a community? Neighborhood? Even if we can agree on the unit of analysis, what exactly about the community is doing the explaining? Do communities act? What is the mechanism at work? In this chapter I shall attempt to make some explanatory progress by setting out a conceptual framework for thinking about community social context and crime. In its pure form my claim is not only that communities matter but also that we need not have to explain individual criminal behavior. Multi-level integration is all the rage these days, but to demonstrate a causal effect of community does not necessarily require individuals as units of analysis. As I shall elaborate, a theory of crime rates, especially one that aims to explain how neighborhoods fare as units of social control over their own public spaces in the here and now, is logically not the same theoretical enterprise as explaining how neighborhoods exert long-term or developmental effects that ultimately translate into individual crime (Wikström & Sampson, 2003). Both sets of mechanisms may be at work, but one does not compel the other.

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