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.”

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.

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.