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Distribution of Criminal Offenses in Sectional Regions

1938; Northwestern University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1137820

2160-0015

Stuart Lottier,

Crime Patterns and Interventions

Two earlier articles in this Journal demonstrate that crime and criminals are not distributed over the country helter-skelter but occur in a regional pattern concentrating about metropolitan cities. This crime region is identical with the metropolitan region, a new unit of population settlement and mobility which has succeeded the town-and-country distribution characteristic of the pre-automobile era. A farmer living thirty or forty miles from Detroit, for example, markets his products in Detroit, and the prices he gets depend upon employment conditions in Detroit. He and his family read Detroit newspapers, attend Detroit theaters, listen to radio broadcasts from Detroit, patronize Detroit department stores. If their Ford is stolen, the local Sheriff calls the Detroit police. And when a major robbery occurs in Detroit, State police and local officers in the surrounding country cooperate in blockading the highways leading out of the city. The metropolitan region functions as a crime region, despite the fact that it has no political existence, nor does any formal agreement exist between the scores of police jurisdictions contained within its boundaries.