Abstract
On the basis of an ecological approach, this article analyzes the crime determinants in neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile. It concludes that the concentration of social disadvantages, disorder and physical deterioration, together with the presence of an oppositional subculture, is associated with a greater occurrence of crimes, and that the development of trust among the neighbors operates as a mechanism for the prevention of criminal activities. The article also identifies the implications that the relationship between crime and the characteristics of the neighborhood would have for the design of public policies aimed at preventing and controlling crime at that level. A representative survey was carried out that collected data from 5861 households belonging to neighborhoods of Greater Santiago. Data have also been collected through direct observation of the characteristics of these neighborhoods. The analyses were carried out at the micro-neighborhood (a small territorial space) and neighborhood unit (intermediate territory between the micro-neighborhood and the commune) level, and econometric estimations of count data type were applied.
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Notes
In 1969 the team led by Phillip Zimbardo abandoned a car unlocked and without license plates in the streets of the Bronx neighborhood in New York. A car of the same make and similar condition was also abandoned in the streets of Palo Alto, California. The car abandoned in the Bronx was ransacked in a few minutes and within 1 week had been completely destroyed. The car abandoned in Palo Alto did not suffer any robbery in 1 week and the neighbors reported the abandoned car to the police. After Zimbardo damaged with a hammer the car abandoned in Palo Alto, it had the same fate as that in the Bronx (for more details see, for example, Diario El País, 2004; Mójate.es, 2010; Diario NTR Zacatecas, 2011; Tatum, 2013).
Greater Santiago is a geographical area covering most of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chilés national capital city. It includes 35 communes. A commune is the basic geographic unit in the political-administrative organization of Chile. The Chilean levels of government are: national, regional, provincial and communal. The municipality is the political-administrative unit that governs the commune.
The block is the most basic territorial unit used for population identification during censuses. It corresponds to the inner territorial space enclosed by the intersection of normally four streets, drawing a square or a rectangle, without there being in this space a smaller unit corresponding to that same definition.
One hundred and fifteen MNs were not considered for the sampling because they were crossed by highways, large avenues or other landmarks that may affect the neighborhood processes.
The observers were previously trained on the procedure they had to apply in their work, on how to fill out a pre-designed form where they had to annotate the landmarks of the neighborhood, and on the characteristics of the territory they had to observe, for which they were given a detailed map.
For example, Diario El Mundo of Spain mentions that this practice, called ‘Shoefiti’ – joining the words shoe and graffiti – would identify drug dealing sites or the occurrence of a murder by a local gang. According to that same article, in 2003 a circular from the Municipality of the City of Los Ángeles ordered the removal of shoes hanging from wires because they indicated drug-dealing sites (see Diario El Mundo, 2008). On the forum of a website related to fans of the Chilean soccer team ‘Colo-Colo’ – where the fans themselves explain the meaning that, according to them, this practice has – almost all the comments attribute it to marking gang territory, drug sale, or an assault or attack on a member of a rival gang (see Dalealbo.cl., 2013). What is interesting about this forum is that the members of these violent supporter groups – who are often related to community gangs in low-income sectors – are those who give opinions with respect to the meaning of this practice.
Data were analyzed using a Poisison’s distribution (see Hausman et al, 1984; Winkelmann and Zimmermann, 1995; Osgood, 2000; Winkelmann, 2008; Trivedi and Munkin, 2010). A negative binomial model was applied as the variables showed some form of overdispersion. To test the existence of data overdispersion the variance and the mean of the dependent variable were compared, the Pearson statistic was divided by the model’s degree of freedom and the methodology proposed by Cameron and Trivedy (1998, 2001, 2009) was applied. Results of these tests are available upon request.
The models were fitted using the complex survey design.
The aim of this multivariate method is to reveal whether there are subjacent variables in the data that may be causing the variability of the variables considered (Costello and Osborne, 2005). Thus, the factorial analysis method analyzes only the common variance between the selected variables. On the other hand, the principal component analysis is commonly used only as a data reduction method (Costello and Osborne, 2005) aimed at maximizing the total variance in the smallest number of factors.
As the questions used for the construction of the indices have an ordinal character, a polyserial correlations matrix was used with the purpose of approaching the possible underestimation of the factors found. Moreover, as there is the possibility that the questions used to measure trust and subculture could be related to each other, a normalized oblique rotation was used, a technique that allows the factors found to be correlated, tackling the problem mentioned above. Once this analysis had been made, the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) test was applied, which allows the suitability of the data to carry out a factorial analysis to be measured.
The city map with this identification is available upon request.
Sampson (2004) further argues that the efforts toward the reduction of crime in the neighborhoods must be accompanied by a feeling of legitimacy of the application of the law by the neighbors and, by extension, of the same law and order that are accepted by the majority of society. A contrario sensu, following the same argumentative logic, the lack of this legitimacy will be associated with contexts of greater crime recurrence. The latter concept is close to that of ‘opposing cultures’ used by Sherman (1998), and that of ‘uncivil cultures’ used in this article.
In contrast with the work of Sampson (2003 and 2004) and Sampson et al (2002), which carries out its analysis in relatively extensive neighborhood units, equivalent to the size of an NU in this article, the present study establishes a smaller additional level of analysis – the MN. This allows evidence to be provided on the setting in which these variables would most properly operate, and consequently, of the scale of the interventions oriented at reducing the levels of crime and violence in the neighborhoods.
See, for instance, the description of Chilean Program on Citizen Security such as ‘Plan Cuadrante de Seguridad Preventiva’ (Quadrant Plan of Preventive Security) (Carabineros de Chile, 2003), ‘Barrio Seguro’ (Safe Neighborhood) (DSCMI, 2004), ‘Barrio en Paz’ (Neighborhood in Peace) (Gobierno de Chile, Ministerio del Interior, 2010).
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate the comments on preliminary versions of this document made by colleagues attending Workshops on Project SOC09, Messrs. Hugo Fruhling, Javier Nuñez, Ricardo Tapia, Roberto Gallardo, and Mrs Ximena Tocornal. We thank those attending the Workshops at the Subsecretaría de Prevención del Delito on 15 December 2011, and at the Programa Barrio en Paz on 4 January 2012, and those attending the Second Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Security on 19 January 2013. We are grateful for additional comments from Dr Fruhling on August 2013 and comments from two anonymous referees of CPCS. Any errors are the authors’ responsibility.
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This article is part of the SOC 09 Project ‘Crimen y Violencia Urbana: aportes de la ecología del delito al diseño de políticas públicas’ (Urban Crime and Violence: contributions of the ecology of crime to the policy design), financially suported by the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) of Chile (Chile’s National Commission of Scientific and Technological Research) in the ‘Anillos de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales’ modality (Team Research in Social Sciences).
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Olavarría-Gambi, M., Allende-González, C. Crime in neighborhoods: Evidence from Santiago, Chile. Crime Prev Community Saf 16, 205–226 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpcs.2014.7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpcs.2014.7