Summary

With the materials presented here, along with the PowerPoint lecture presentation, I hope you have an understanding of how crime is measured and tracked, and of the importance of thinking about crime epidemiologically (in terms of patterns, and trends) and how this is a useful precursor to thinking about and evaluating theories of crime that will be presented as the course moves forward. It is important to remember that understandings of crime causation derive in part from our understandings of how much crime there is in a society, where crime is disproportionately located, and how the dispersion of crime varies not only across place, but over time. Even though these data sources have important limitations that necessarily underestimate the “true” extent of crime in the society, it is nevertheless important to understand how crime is measured and what these data tell us about the prevalence of crime in the society, as legislators and the police often make decisions about resource allocation based on a close examination of these data.

In thinking about the so-called “great American crime decline” it is also important to note that the trends we can observe in America are also observable across most of the Western world. That is, in nations like Britain, Australia, and so forth, rates of crime also began declining in the 1990s after rising steadily for a number of years. So in thinking about reasons for the decline, it is also important to not to be insular by considering social changes and developments that only affect the U.S. and North America. One example would be the global decline in levels of toxic lead in the environment, which was a socioenvironmental change that was seen in the US as well as the rest of the world, and which will be discussed later in the course. Such factors then become incorporated into the theoretical paradigms presented in the ensuing lessons and chapters, and just like crime rates, theoretical paradigms change over time, becoming more sophisticated as understandings of social and environmental factors (and their interplay) become more refined, incorporating new knowledge. And just like crime rate data tracked by the UCR and NCVS, various theories provide a filtered, or partial view of crime as a social phenomenon, with each theory having a piece of the overall puzzle.