Urban Crime, Criminals, and Victims: The Swedish Experience in an Anglo-American Comparative Perspective

278 Pages·1991·11.13 MB·English

by  Per-Olof H. Wikström (auth.)

Research in Criminology
Series Editors
Alfred Blumstein
David P. Farrington
Research in Criminology
Understanding and Controlling Crime: Toward A New Research Strategy
David P. Farrington, Lloyd E. Ohlin and James Q. Wilson
The Social Ecology of Crime
J.M. Byrne and R.J. Sampson (Eds.)
The Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives on Offending
Derek B. Cornish and Ronald V. Clarke (Eds.)
The Social Contexts of Criminal Sentencing
Martha A. Myers and Susette M. Talarico
Predicting Recidivism Using Survival Models
Peter Schmidt and Ann Dryden Witte
Coping, Behavior, and Adaptation in Prison Inmates
Edward Zamble and Frank J. Porporino
Prison Crowding: A Psychological Perspective
Paul B. Paulus
Off School, In Court: An Experimental and Psychiatric Investigation
of Severe School Attendance Problems
I. Berg, I. Brown and R. Hullin
Policing and Punishing the Drinking Driver:
A Study of General and Specific Deterrence
Ross Homel
Judicial Decision Making, Sentencing Policy, and Numerical Guidance
Austin Lovegrove
Criminal Behavior and the Justice System: Psychological Perspectives
Hermann Wegener, Friedrich LOsel and Jochen Haisch (Eds.)
Male Criminal Activity from Childhood Through Youth:
Multilevel and Developmental Perspectives
Marc Le Blanc and Marcel Frechette
Multiple Problem Youth:
Delinquency, Substance Use, and Mental Health Problems
D.S. Elliott, D. Huizinga and S. Menard
continued on page 271
Per-Olof H. Wikstrom
Urban Crime, Criminals,
and Victims
The Swedish Experience in an Anglo-American
Comparati ve Perspective
With 49 Illustrations
Springer-Verlag
New York Berlin Heidelberg London
Paris Tokyo Hong Kong Barcelona
Per-Olof H. Wikstrom
Department of Criminology
University of Stockholm
S-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wikstrom, Per-Olof H.
Urban crime, criminals, and victims: the Swedish experience in an
Anglo-American comparative perspective / by Per-Olof H. Wikstrom.
p. cm. - (Research in criminology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-9079-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-9077-0
DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4613-9077-0
I. Crime-Sweden. I. Title. II. Series.
HV7038.5.W55 1991
364.1 '09485'091732--dc20 90-10124
Printed on acid-free paper.
© 1991 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1991
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9 8 7 6 5 432 1
Acknowledgments
This book builds predominantly upon several different research projects on crime
in urban areas conducted during the 1980s and directed by the author. The vari
ous projects have been carried out at the Department of Criminology, University
of Stockholm, and at the Research Unit of the National Crime Prevention Coun
cil, Sweden. I wish to thank my colleagues at these two institutes for their en
couragement, helpful comments, and assistance, and in particular my thanks
go to Professor Knut Sveri, Lars Dolmen, and Jan Ahlberg. Johan Gasste and
Kerstin Ohrnell have made a great contribution to some of the research presented
here in assisting with the coding and compilation of the data for the various parts
of what in this book is labeled the Stockholm 1982 Crime Survey (see Appendix
A).
Some of the findings presented in this book (parts of Chap. 3 and Chap. 7) are
a result of studies I have made working on Project Metropolitan, a longitudinal
study of a Stockholm cohort (see Wikstrom, 1985, pp. 117-133; 1987a, 1989a,
1989b, and Farrington & Wikstrom, 1990). Project Metropolitan is directed by
Professor Carl-Gunnar Janson, Department of Sociology, University of Stock
holm, to whom I am grateful for valuable comments on my research. Some of
the findings, and some tables, in Chapter 3 have previously been published in
an article by the author in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 6. No
1, and are published in this book with the kind permission of Plenum Press.
The research reported in this book has been generously supported by grants
from many different foundations:
• The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
• The Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
• The Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology.
• The National Council for Crime Prevention, Sweden.
• The Swedish National Police Board.
In addition it can be mentioned that Project Metropolitan operates on grants
from the Commission for Social Research and the Swedish Council for Planning
v
vi Acknowledgments
and Coordination of Research, and was until 1985 supported by the Bank of
Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
Dr. David P. Farrington has been my major source of inspiration in taking on
the task to complete this book. His encouragement has been invaluable to me.
This book was completed while I was a visiting fellow at the Institute of
Criminology, Cambridge University, England.
Contents
Acknowledgments............................................................... . .... v
Chapter l. Introduction ........................................................... .
Scope and Aim of Study.......................... ...... ........ ........ ..... 2
Some Brief Notes on Swedish Society and Its Crime ................. 3
Chapter 2 The Rate, Structure, and Trends in Urban Crime............... 7
The Rate of Crime ............................................................ 8
Trends in Crime ............................................................... 11
Explaining the Difference.................................................... 13
Chapter 3 The Urban Offender .................................................. 16
Offenders in Urban Crime................................................... 17
Crime and Its Development in the Urban Population................... 24
The Distribution of Crime in the Urban Population..................... 27
Specialization and Versatility in Crime.................................... 30
Age Patterns.................................................................... 36
Chapter 4 The Social Contexts of Urban Crime.............................. 49
Contextual Crime Analysis .................................................. 50
Urban Violence................................................................ 51
Urban Vandalism.. .............. ........ .... ............ .... .... ....... ....... 82
Urban Serious Theft........................................................... 88
Conclusion.......... ..... ................. .. .................. .. .. .......... .. .. 97
Chapter 5 The Urban Victim..................................................... 100
The Victimological Approach............................................... 100
Chapter 6 Stockholm: Its Crime and Urban Structure....................... 111
The Research Area............................................................ III
Crime Rates and Crime Trends in the City of Stockholm.. ..... ....... 113
vii
Vlll Contents
The Basic Units of Analysis................................................. 115
The Inner- and Outer-City Areas... ......... ........ ............. ..... ..... 116
Housing in Stockholm........................................................ 120
The Factorial Social Ecology of Stockholm.............................. 121
Grouping Wards to Major Types of Urban Environments ........ ..... 127
Chapter 7 Housing, Population Composition, and Offending.............. 130
The Offender Residential Distribution..................................... 132
The Offender Rate Distributions............................................ 135
Age Structure and Offender Rates.......................................... 147
The Individual-Level Relationship Between Housing and Offending
in Childhood and youth................................................... 150
Zero-Order Correlations...................................................... 154
Population Composition and Offending ................................... 156
Familism, SES, Social Problem Households, and Offending.......... 159
Population Composition and Offending Within Different Types of
Housing ...................................................................... 171
Housing, Population Composition, and Offending: An Integrated
Model......................................................................... 173
Chapter 8 Routine Activities, Area Crime, and Victimization Patterns.. 185
The Crime Area Distribution................................................ 191
The Area Crime Rate Distributions ........................................ 200
Crime and Distance ........................................................... 213
Explaining Area Crime Distribution.......... ............ .. . .. .. .. .... 225
The Area Distribution of Victims of Personal Crime................... 232
Chapter 9 Integration and Discussion of Findings ........................... 237
Urbanization and Crime...................................................... 237
The Urban Offender.............................. .................... ......... 241
The Urban Victim ........ ........ .... ...... ............. ...................... 243
City Structure and the Rate and Structure of Crime.. . .. ... .. .. .... .... . 244
References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Appendix A The Stockholm 1982 Crime Survey ............................ 260
Appendix B Legal Definitions of Crimes Included in the Stockholm 1982
Crime Survey..................... .............. ........ ............. 264
Appendix C Definitions of Variables Used in the Factor Analysis of
Stockholm Urban Structure....................................... 268
1
Introduction
Crime is largely an urban phenomenon, but the specifically urban and area dimen
sions of the social processes that are connected with crime have been seriously
understated in much recent criminological work ... Such a claim could not have
been made forty years ago.
(Baldwin & Bottoms, 1976, p. 1).
The above statement by Baldwin and Bottoms about the neglect in crimi
nology of the urban dimension of crime was made in the mid-1970s.
However, in the last decade there has been a significant upswing in theory
and research on crime in the urban environment. Also, new areas oftheory
and research into urban crime have come into focus. (For overviews see
Brantingham & Brantingham, 1984; Davidson, 1981.) One very good
example of the increasing interest in urban crime is the recent volume of
Crime and Justice entitled "Communities and Crime" (Reiss & Tonry,
1986), in which Reiss makes a strong argument for the importance of the
study of crime in urban communities and for the linking of the ecological
and individual traditions in theory and research on crime.
A review of the literature on crime in urban environments shows, not
unexpectedly, that Anglo-American research heavily dominates the scene
(Wikstrom, 1982; 1987b). Hence, much of the experience we have on
urban crime is based on North American and British research and theory.
In this book, I shall try to give the Swedish experience on urban crime in an
Anglo-American comparative perspective. The Anglo-American compara
tive perspective means, first, that much of the analysis made in this book
takes as its point of departure the theories and findings of Anglo-American
research on urban crime and, second, that when possible, the Swedish
findings are compared with those of North American and British research.
Needless to say, this is not, nor is it intended to be, a comparative study.
But hopefully the results presented in this book might contribute interest
ing questions for genuine cross-national research on urban crime. There is
a great lack of true cross-national comparative studies in criminology
(McClintock & Wikstrom, 1987), and it is my view that to advance our
1
2 1. Introduction
understanding of crime and its causes, there is a great need for the develop
ment of such research. Cross-national studies are important for showing
us the common and unique features of crime in different countries, for
evaluating the generalizability of existing theories or for generating new
theories (Bennet, 1980), and for giving us perspectives on criminality in
our own countries and the policies and measures we use to handle it.
Scope and Aim of Study
This book is a study of urban crime in post-Second-Worid-War Sweden.
Although urban crime from the 1950s and onward will be studied, the focus
will be on urban crime in contemporary Sweden, because most research
in Sweden relevant to this topic was carried out in the late 1970s and in the
1980s. The major empirical studies presented in this book concern Stock
holm, Sweden's biggest city; therefore, there will be a special focus on
crime in Stockholm.
The focus of this study is primarily on what have been labeled traditional
crimes (i.e., violence, vandalism, and theft) as opposed to modern crimes
(i.e., traffic crimes, computer crimes, tax fraud etc.)-(Sveri, 1974). Most
traditional crimes are direct-contact predatory crimes (Cohen & Felson,
1979, p. 589), that is, crimes directed toward another person or another
person's property that imply a direct contact between the offender and his
or her target.
The overall aims of this book are to present the findings from different
studies on urban crime, to give the Swedish experience on urban crime,
and to relate the Swedish experience of urban crime to the experiences
from Anglo-American research. A more specific aim is to try to link major
approaches to the study of crime in exploring urban crime in Sweden.
In discussing different traditions of research in criminology (ie., the indi
vidual and ecological approaches), Reiss (1986) concludes, "More is to be
gained by linking those traditions than by their continued separate de
velopment and testing" (p. 29). In this book, four different approaches to
the study of crime will be taken up, and some tentative efforts to link them
will be made. These four approaches are the following:
• The offender and criminal career approach (see Chap. 3).
• The contextual analysis of crime approach (see Chap. 4).
• The victimological approach (see Chap. 5, parts of Chap. 8).
• The ecologicaVenvironmental approach (see Chaps. 6,7,8).
Before turning specifically to these four approaches in the study of urban
crime, I shall give an introduction to urban crime in Sweden in Chapter 2,
which will include the rate, structure, and trends of Swedish urban crimi
nality. Chapter 3 is devoted to the offender and criminal career approach.
Both cross-sectional and longitudinal data will be used in Chapter 3 to