In this chapter, we first provide an overview of health and mental health outcomes across the different types of street segments studied to assess whether residents of crime hot spots have more adverse health issues compared with residents living on street segments with little or no crime. We find that there are strong relationships between mental and physical health and living in crime hot spots as opposed to non-hot spots. We then examine whether negative health outcomes are a consequence of living in a crime hot spot. We find that hot spots of crime are not simply places with high crime rates; they are also places with strong physical and mental health deficits. After accounting for selection, several physical and mental health problems are found to result from living in a crime hot spot.

This chapter goes beyond a descriptive view of crime hot spots to explore how hot spots and non-hot spots vary within and across communities. Using the characteristics we focused on in Chapter 2, we ask whether the extent to which hot spots and non-hot spots differ depends on the type of community they are nested within. We also examine to what extent hot spot streets have similar characteristics across the city, or whether hot spots look different depending on the community they are nested within. We find that hot spots differ on most characteristics from streets with little crime regardless of the type of community they are nested in (as indicated by levels of concentrated disadvantage). At the same time, community context does matter in terms of understanding characteristics such as structural measures of social disorganization and disorder. Even so, we find that hot spots of crime have similarly low levels of informal social control irrespective of the communities in which they are nested.”

This chapter directly examines whether social context influences crime on street segments by building statistical models that examine the relationship between social context and crime, while taking into account key elements of opportunities for crime at place. Our findings reinforce the importance of including social context and informal social control in understanding crime rates at micro geographic places, while also confirming that opportunities for crime are important underlying causes of crime at the micro geographic level.

This chapter brings social context and social structure into the story of crime hot spots. We begin by examining why criminologists have, for the most part, ignored micro geographic study of crime until the late twentieth century. This was, in part, the result of not having data available at the micro geographic level, but also related to the overriding interests of sociologists in the study of spatial criminology with micro geographic units, such as neighborhoods and communities. We then turn to the importance of new theoretical innovations that focused interest on hot spots of crime, but led criminologists to largely ignore the social context of these places. Having placed the study of crime hot spots in historical perspective, we bring social context into the study of crime and place by examining variability of measures of social disadvantage and social disorganization across hot spots and non-hot spot streets in our study. We pay particular attention to informal social control as measured by collective efficacy in communities (Sampson et al., 1997). We also examine characteristics of hot spots that are often seen as tightly linked to crime, such as social and physical disorder and fear of crime.

In this introductory chapter, we set the stage for what we learned from our study in later chapters. We begin with a discussion of the law of crime concentration. In some sense, it is the first law of study of crime and place, because it provides a logic for why it is important to examine hot spots of crime. We then turn to a brief history and description of the research site for our study – Baltimore City, Maryland. It is important to put Baltimore in historical context to be able to understand the specific research environment from which we draw our data. Following this, we detail our data collection. We describe the main features of our research program, which employed rigorous methods to identify places for study and collect data for analyses. Finally, we provide an overview of the directions we take in the book, introducing the chapters that follow.

This chapter focuses directly on explaining low levels of informal social control at crime hot spots. In previous chapters, informal social control was found to vary greatly across the hot spot and non-hot spot streets in our study. In this chapter, we seek to explain that variability. We find that crime and social disorder are key factors in explaining low informal social control at crime hot spots. Contrary to broken windows theory, we find that physical disorder has little impact on informal or community social control.

In this concluding chapter, we begin by reviewing what we have learned about the social structure and social context of crime hot spots, and how that leads us to reconsider both our understanding of the crime problem and of hot spots of crime themselves. We then turn to the policy implications of our work. Focusing on the social context of crime hot spots opens up a new array of potential approaches to do something about the crime problem. In turn, it brings us to recognize that other problems concentrate at crime hot spots, and addressing those problems may be important to control crime, and to ameliorate the disadvantages that people who live in crime hot spots experience.

In this chapter, we begin by discussing how macro-level theories, such as social disorganization and collective efficacy, have been tested to understand the risk of victimization, followed by the application of routine activity theory to understand the locations of crime and risk of victimization at the individual or household level. We then turn to the characteristics of individuals that have long been seen as key to understanding victimization. Examining property crime victimization in our sample, our findings strongly support our interest in the impact of social context on crime.