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.

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.