By John MacDonald
Key Takeaways:
- In cities crime is highly concentrated and entrenched in a few small areas.
- Strategies to reduce crime that focus on community changes have strong theoretical and empirical support.
- The best place-based interventions reduce serious crimes by making areas less attractive to criminal behavior rather than relying on arrests or social services.
- Cleaning up blighted physical disorder in communities is key to effective crime prevention.
- Place-based interventions should be viewed as complements to effective and constitutional policing.
- Governments should provide matching grants and other incentives to encourage communities to make improvements that reduce crime.
In every city, a small group of blocks generate most of the serious crime. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, for example, just 6-13% of street addresses where a crime was reported between 2021 and 2022 account for 50% of all reported crime.1 The hyper-concentration of crime is so common worldwide that Hebrew University criminologist David Weisburd refers to the “law of crime concentration.”2 Cambridge University criminologist Lawrence Sherman coined the term crime “hot spots” and noted their relative stability, suggesting the routine activities of these spaces could be “regulated far more easily than the routine activities of persons” (p. 49).3 The location of these crime hot spots is remarkably stable year after year, and when cities experience a surge in serious crime an outsized share is driven by crime hot spots. Research that examined the surge in shootings in 2020-2021 found that 47% of the rise in New York and 55% in Los Angeles occurred in only 10% of census blocks groups.4 The empirical reality of the concentration of crime in cities suggests there are features of these places that make crime endemic.