DIFU-Extranet
Security in the City
Dietrich Oberwittler
The Development of Crime and the Fear of Crime in Germany - Consequences for Crime Prevention
The Development of Crime
The Development of the Subjective Perception of Crime
The Localized Distribution of Crime and Fear of Crime
Remarks on Crime Prevention from a Criminological Perspective
Abstract:
The article presents criminological findings on current trends in crime and on the development of the subjective sense of security in Germany. Despite the rise in recorded juvenile violence, which is partly the result of a change of behaviour in reporting offences, the overall trend appears to be positive. The spatial perspective shows that large cities are the focus of the problem, but that fear of crime is influenced less by the "objective" crime situation than by problematic social situations in residential areas. The significance of these findings for crime prevention is discussed in this light, but there is clearly also a need for empirical evaluation of how effective crime prevention measures are.
In the discussion of recent years, "prevention" has become a key concept in crime policy, entering into numerous approaches and activities.(1) Two fundamental considerations, also to be found in the First Periodic Security Report of the Federal Government (BMI/BMJ 2001), are particularly relevant from the local government point of view. Firstly - as far as "classical" forms of crime are concerned (juvenile delinquency, violent crime, street crime) - the local level is the most important at which crime prevention measures have to be developed and implemented if they are to be effective. Secondly, crime prevention aims not only to improve the "objective" security situation by reducing crime but also to ameliorate the "subjective" situation in the perception of the public by diminishing the fear of crime (BMI/BMJ 2001: 604). Whereas there is little doubt about the first aspect, and the second is shared by many players in crime prevention, opinions are divided on what consequences the orientation of crime policy could have on the public's subjective sense of security (Boers 2002; Frehsee 2000).
Given the many facets and complexity of "urban crime and insecurity," which has inspired a burgeoning research literature (for overviews see Eisner 1997; Gestring et al. 2003; Heitmeyer et al. 1998; Jehle 2001; Kury et al. 2000; Schwind et al. 2001), this article restricts itself to findings on current trends in crime and the development of the subjective sense of security in Germany, paying particular attention to the spatial aspects of these phenomena. It transpires that some of what is frequently considered "established knowledge" needs to be relativised. Although these findings allow few specific inferences for crime prevention, they do permit the dimensions and the development of the problems involved to be considered with the necessary objectivity, and certain general conclusions to be drawn on the possibilities of and limits to crime prevention. The article concludes with further thoughts about crime prevention from the point of view of empirical criminological research.
The Development of Crime
The usual practice is to measure crime development on the basis of the "official" crime statistics derived from police records. Whereas the media and political forums often make uncritical use of these figures, experts agree that developments registered in police crime statistics should not be equated with the "true" (2) development of crime (Heinz 2002; Killias 2002; Lüdemann/Ohlemacher 2002).
A double trend is discernable in the development of recorded crime in Germany over the last 15 years or so (cf. figure 1). Crimes against property (in this case aggravated theft) have declined markedly after peaking in the early 1990s; between 1987 and 2001 the frequency figure in relation to population dropped by 36 per cent. Over the same period the violent crime rate has risen steadily by 65 per cent. But this primarily reflects less serious forms of violence and does not apply with regard to homicide, where the figures have even fallen by a quarter.
Figure 1: Frequency of recorded criminal offences (Germany 1987-2001)
Source: BKA, PKS-Zeitreihen 1987 to 2001, T01.
The rise in violent crime can be described more exactly as a rise in juvenile violence, since both offenders and victims are practically all under the age of 21, belonging to age groups that show a dramatic increase in delinquency figures (see figure 2).
Figure 2: Suspect and victimization figures for serious and for dangerous bodily harm by age groups (Germany 1987-2001)
Victims: All victims in relation to both German and non-German resident population.Suspects: only Germans, in relation to the German resident population.Source: BKA, PKS-Zeitreihen 1987 to 2001, T40 and T91.
These crime figures - which can be calculated only for Germans owing to the problem of foreigners not belonging to the resident population - increase in proportion to the youth of the age groups involved, the maximum figure of 630 per cent being reached by the 12 to 14 age group, still under the age of criminal capacity (cf. figure 3). In the case of non-German children and adolescents, in contrast, for whom only the absolute case figures are known, no major increase is apparent (Bundeskriminalamt 2002: 75 f.).
Figure 3: Percentage rise in suspect rates among Germans for serious and dangerous bodily harm by age group (Germany 1987 and 2001)
Source: BKA, PKS-Zeitreihen 1987 to 2001, T40, own calculations.
As with earlier rises, this latest wave has been accompanied by an increase in public and media concern about "youth" and deviant behaviour (Schubarth 1998), whereas criminological research has engaged in a differentiated discussion on the possible backgrounds (in summary: Heinz 2002; Walter 2001: 291 ff.). A four to six fold rise in the propensity of children and adolescents for violence within only a few years should arouse a healthy mistrust of official crime statistics. Self-reported crime surveys showed that the actual increase in violent acts was markedly lower (Tillmann et al. 1999; Lösel et al. 1998). In a North Rhine-Westphalian comparative study, Mansel and Hurrelmann (1998) calculated a 30 per cent increase between 1988 and 1996 in school student respondents who had committed violence at least once in the preceding year, and a 50 per cent increase in multiple offenders. At the same time there are indications that the behaviour of young victims and their families in reporting offences has changed, which would explain the discrepancy in development between reported and estimated unreported crime (Köllisch/ Oberwittler, forthcoming). In extreme cases this could mean the police recording a rise in juvenile delinquency when unreported crime is actually declining. In the surveys of school students conducted by the Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute between 1998 and 2000, the share of violent juveniles fell markedly in all the cities under study, whereas the police crime statistics for the whole of Germany showed a further increase in alleged juvenile offenders of more than 20 per cent for the same period (cf. figure 4).
Figure 4: Development of recorded and unrecorded juvenile violence (Germany and four cities, 1998 and 2000)
Police crime statistics: bodily harm offences; unreported crime surveys: violent crimes.Sources: BKA, PKS-Zeitreihen 1987 to 2001, T20; BMI/BMJ, Erster Periodischer Sicherheitsbericht, 585 (Surveys by the Kriminologisches Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen).
The increase in inter-ethnic offender/victim combinations could be responsible for this paradoxical development: owing to the immigration waves of the 1990s, there has been a strong increase in the number of children and adolescents in Germany not born in this country who (or whose parents) apparently find it more difficult in the event of conflict to avoid offences being reported or having to reach an informal settlement with the victims. Surveys of self-reported crime among juveniles show that the probability of a victim of violent crime reporting it to the police is considerably higher if the offender has a different ethnic background (BMI/BMJ: 501; Oberwittler/Köllisch 2003). This probably also affects ethnic German immigrants from the successor states to the Soviet Union, who are not recorded separately in police crime statistics owing to their German nationality. Separate regional evaluations of police data have, however, shown that crime rates among young ethnic German immigrants from eastern Europe are sometimes much higher than among native-born German juveniles, and that the latest rise in crime rates among young people of German nationality is to a considerable extent attributable to such "Aussiedler" (Grundies 2001; Luff 2000).
Independently of this immigration-related problem, there are indications that the tendency of children and adolescents to report crimes of violence could have increased over the long term (Albrecht/Lamnek 1979; Köllisch/Oberwittler, forthcoming; Schwind et al. 2001). This may point to lower tolerance thresholds towards misconduct on the part of children and adolescents, to declining informal capacities for conflict regulation, but possibly also to greater public acceptance of the police, or to intimidation of certain target groups by a stronger police presence, e.g., in the context of municipal and school crime prevention. If, for instance, the police - rightly - seeks to cooperate with schools in taking more offensive action against serious forms of violence between juveniles, the paradoxical outcome of these efforts may be a rise in official crime rates.
This invites several conclusions: first, it can be assumed that the rise in juvenile violence in recent years, which cannot be denied in absolute terms, has been far lower than the official statistics report; and, second, that this source of information is hardly suitable as an indicator for measuring the success of crime prevention measures, especially as regards offences where the dark figure is very high. Only repeated and methodologically controlled self-reported crime surveys permit the effects of crime prevention measures on the behaviour of young people to be assessed.
The Development of the Subjective Perception of Crime
In recent years, research into the "fear of crime" has demonstrated the complexity of the factors that determine the subjective perception of crime (Boers 1993, 2002). Surveys therefore regularly take account of a whole range of closely related aspects. Respondents are asked not only about their general satisfaction with public security and crime prevention, but also for their subjective assessment of the risk of becoming the victim of certain crimes within the coming twelve months and about their sense of security "alone out in their neighbourhood after dark" (so-called "standard question" on the fear of crime). It proved that the fear of crime depends both on personal factors which can influence vulnerability to crime - such as gender, age, and social status - and on developments in society as a whole that produce measurable rises and falls in the subjective sense of security without any necessary relation to "objective" trends in crime (Reuband 1999: 15). Finally, the given situation in residential areas naturally has an impact on the fear of crime (see detailed treatment below).
Nationwide surveys since the mid-1990s have shown a positive trend in all indicators of the subjective sense of security, as opposed to a marked temporary rise in the sense of insecurity between the late 1980s and 1993 in West Germany. Figure 5 shows these values for the development of general satisfaction with public security between 1984 and 1998 separately for West and East Germany. In West Germany satisfaction reached the highest score for some 20 years in 1998. In East Germany, where dissatisfaction was much greater after regime change than in the West, a still higher increase in satisfaction was recorded up to 1998. The perceived risk of victimization showed the same trend: in West Germany the proportion of respondents who considered it probable or very probable that they would be burgled fell from 43 per cent in 1993 to 29 per cent in 1998; in East Germany the figure fell from 65 per cent to 43 per cent. In 1993, 29 per cent of West German respondents feared robbery, but only 14 per cent in 1998. In East Germany the figures were 48 per cent and 27 per cent for the same two years. Victim surveys in the United Kingdom record similar figures. In Britain the proportion of people afraid of being mugged sank from 21 per cent in 1994 to 15 per cent in 2001 (Kershaw et al. 2001: 38).
Figure 5: Satisfaction with public security - scale average (Germany 1984-1998)
Question: "How satisfied are you, all in all, with public security and the fight against crime?" on an eleven point rating scale from 0 "totally dissatisfied" to 10 "totally satisfied."Source: Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen (ZUMA), System der Sozialen Indikatoren, öffentliche Sicherheit und Kriminalität (K017).
Finally, figures on the fear of crime in the neighbourhood (standard question) also shows a trend towards greater serenity, weaker in West Germany than in East Germany. There it was strongest both in communities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants and in cities with a population of over 500,000, where the fear of crime dropped by 18 per cent and 17 per cent respectively (figure 6). If one compares these figures with the strong rise in recorded violent crime, it is clear that, although the "objective" security situation and the subjective sense of security have diverged, the actual risk of victimization is still strongly overestimated. It should be remembered that children and adolescents, almost the only age group to be affected by the latest rise in violent crime and the changes in crime-reporting and recording behaviour, were either not covered at all by these surveys or not taken into separate account in interpreting the results.
Figure 6: Fear of crime by community size classes (West and East Germany, 1993 and 1998)
Question: Percentage of people who answered the question: "How safe do you feel or would you feel alone outside at night in this neighbourhood?" by "rather/very insecure."Source: Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen (ZUMA), System der Sozialen Indikatoren, öffentliche Sicherheit und Kriminalität (K018).
Recent time series in nationwide surveys up to the present confirm the overall positive trend and the continued approximation of East Germans' sense of security to that of West Germans (Jungbauer-Gans 2002). In the regular surveys conducted by the insurance firm R+V Versicherung, the scale score for the fear of crime in 2001 and 2002 in West Germany returned to the low base value of 1991; at the same time the gap between fear of crime among East and West Germans narrowed from 0.6 (1996) to 0.15 points (2002) on a scale from 1 to 7 (R+V Versicherung 2002). The fear of crime among respondents in Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Brandenburg is now less strong than in some West German Länder. On the basis of local surveys, Reuband (2001) also shows that the subjective risk of victimization in Dresden dropped considerably between 1997 and 2000, and is now below the level of Düsseldorf. From a present day perspective, the marked fear of crime that prevailed in East Germany after regime change can be seen primarily as a phenomenon of upheaval; people have now become accustomed to crime (Boers 2002): 1408; Reuband 1999). Up-to-date time series are also available for Frankfurt am Main. In the regular community survey, the percentage of residents who regarded crime as the biggest problem in the city dropped from 57 per cent in 1994 to only 17 per cent in 2002 (Dobroschke 2003: 42). In 2002 only 32 per cent of respondents were dissatisfied with public security compared with 68 per cent in 1994, and the fear of neighbourhood crime decreased markedly.
The generally more optimistic trend in the subjective sense of security in East and West Germany should not, however, hide the fact that a significant section of the population still fears crime and that only a narrow majority of respondents is satisfied with the state of public security. These research findings therefore contradict the fact that crime and crime prevention can apparently rally public dissatisfaction and play a decisive role in elections, as the Hamburg city parliament election in 2001 showed. The mechanisms that, in certain situations, can translate subjective perceptions of crime into significant factors in the political arena are less well understood by researchers than the fear of crime itself. Apparently the mass media play an independent role in that they can reinforce and activate public attitudes (Reuband 2002). It has been repeatedly shown that, during past and present phases of societal development, the subject of crime (especially youth crime) is of high symbolic significance and is suitable for focussing the unspecific fears that arise particularly in times of rapid social change (Pearson 1984). This is especially true when other threat scenarios - such as external dangers - are lacking, as was the case in Germany after the end of the Cold War.
The Localized Distribution of Crime and Fear of Crime
It is taken for granted that large cites are more strongly affected by crime, especially violent crime, than smaller communities, let alone rural areas. And, in fact, the frequency of recorded violent crime increases markedly in proportion to the size of the community, being much greater in cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants than in smaller communities (figure 7). This is particularly the case with robbery, whereas homicide - unlike in the United States, for example - is relatively evenly spread across all forms of community and is therefore not a symptom of urban "excesses of violence." The concentration of violent crime in large cities has provoked a number of different explanatory approaches, which take account both of residents' social-structure problems, the socio-spatial reinforcement of such problems in deprived areas, and specific urban opportunity (summary in Eisner 1997). The link apparent in figure 6 between community size and fear of crime shows that the subjective sense of security follows this spatial distribution of violent crime.
Figure 7: Rates of recorded violent crime by community size classes (Germany 1999)
Source: BKA, Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik für 1999, T8.
Contrary to popular belief, the city-country gap in (recorded) violent crime has not widened over the past 20 years; in fact, it has slightly narrowed: Between 1979 and 1999, the percentage of cases of serious and dangerous bodily harm recorded in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants dropped from 56,4 per cent to 48.5 per cent; in the case of robbery the figure fell from 67.2 per cent to 63.0 per cent (Bundeskriminalamt 1979, 1999). And the current rise in juvenile delinquency has been less marked in large cities than elsewhere (Oberwittler/Köllisch 2003:138). The city-country gap in crime is also relativised by the fact that cities perform a central place function in this regard, as well, so that many offenders and victims of urban violence are not local residents (Killias 2002: 132). If this were to be taken into account in official suspect rates, which are drawn up not on the basis of place of residence but of the scene of the crime, juvenile delinquency rates for, e.g., county boroughs in Baden-Württemberg would exceed those for counties not by 174 per cent but by only 47 per cent (Oberwittler/Köllisch 2003:142).
Similarly, it has long been known that violent crime in large cities is concentrated in a few small areas - so-called "hot spots" (Oberwittler 2001; Sherman et al. 1997). This realisation has made an essential contribution to the growing importance of spatial crime prevention, addressing not persons but situations and crime opportunities. Various experiments have shown that street crime can be effectively reduced through the spatially concentrated deployment of resources without necessarily triggering a displacement effect (Eck 1997).
To the urban dweller, however, the threat from violent crime looks different; contrary to expectations, it is not the residents of city centres, the areas most strongly affected by violent crime, who feel insecure, but residents of socially deprived neighbourhoods where many unemployed people, welfare recipients, and people of non-German origin live (Kury et al. 2000: 404-408; Obergfell-Fuchs 2001: 474). This finding, paradoxical at first glance, can be attributed to two circumstances illustrated by recent research results from the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg.(3) First, the personal risk of victimization is by no means very high in city centres, since the number of offences committed is distributed across a population that is many times greater than the local residential population. Looking at crime distribution in Cologne, it appears that the statistical focus of victimization risk shifts from the city centre to the socially deprived residential areas if the non-resident population coming into the inner city to work, shop, or for leisure purposes are taken into account in calculating frequency figures (figure 8).(4) Second, localized analysis of crime fears shows that it is not the statistical risk of victimization but rather the social composition of the resident population - especially the proportion of children and adolescents dependent on welfare - which displays the closest links with the fear of crime. A scatter diagram (figure 9) clearly shows this link - extraordinarily close for social science conditions - between the rate of welfare recipients under the age of 18 and the fear of crime ("insecurity outside alone after dark") at the level of 60 censustracts in Cologne and Freiburg and some rural communities around Freiburg. This result is confirmed by resident rankings of neighbourhood problems. In open-ended questioning without pre-quoted answer categories, residents of all the Cologne censustracts under study named social composition and poverty as the most important problems. As was to be expected, this was especially the case in socially deprived neighbourhoods. In second place, 25 per cent of respondents in particularly deprived areas named the refuse problem, and in third place, some 20 per cent, came crime and other forms of unsocial behaviour. On average for all districts, crime ranked sixth in problem perception, with a figure of 12.4 per cent (cf. Obergfell-Fuchs 2001: 411).
Figure 8: Absolute and relative density distribution of violent crime in the city (Cologne 1999/2000)
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absolute density distribution |
density distribution relative to population at risk |
N=6363 calls and interventions on account of bodily harm.Data: Cologne police; calculations and maps: Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht, Freiburg.
Figure 9: Scatter diagram for the composition of social problem situations and fear of crime in neighbourhoods (Cologne, Freiburg and Freiburg area, 2001)
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welfare recipient rate (under 18 yrs.) |
Fear of crime: Scale mean of answers between 0 ("very safe") and 3 ("very unsafe") to the question: "How safe do you feel or would you feel if you were alone out in the neighbourhood after dark?"Data: Stadt Köln, Amt für Stadtentwicklung und Statistik, des Max-Planck-Instituts für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht.
These findings can contribute towards a better understanding of the subjective sense of security. The fear of crime is obviously determined very strongly by the social problems prevailing in people's immediate life worlds, and can best be interpreted as a generalised mistrust of others, presumable nurtured by specific negative experience with low social cohesion and a lack of social order in everyday life, but which is not necessarily fed by any crime that people have themselves suffered. It is remarkable that the fear of crime is specifically influenced by the rate of welfare recipients among children and adolescents, for this indicates that the neighbourhood registers the life led by children and adolescents in poverty with particular attention. The consequences of such a life for young people - in the sense of the development of sub-culture orientations and deviant behaviour - are possible regarded as more dangerous than for adults (Butterwege/Klundt 2002; Klocke/Hurrelmann 1998; in preparation; Walper 1999).
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Tab. 1: Subjective perception of the most important problems in one's own urban neighbourhood (Cologne 2001)
(1) Official welfare recipient rate among residents under 18 (tertiles, low: 0 to 11 %; medium: 11 to 21 %; high: 21 to 51 %). Database: Resident survey by the Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches Strafrecht, subfile Cologne, N=1421 respondents. |
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These findings support the sort of primarily social approach to crime prevention directed against the dangers of social and socio-spatial exclusion that has anyway been pursued by local authorities with their engagement in youth and social affairs (von Kodolitsch 1997) and embraced by the Federal-Länder programme "Socially Integrative City." The social stabilisation of deprived urban districts is doubtless a key factor in improving the sense of security in cities.
This also makes it clear why the much-discussed "broken windows" approach to crime prevention, which accords the repressive fight against physical decay and unsocial behaviours (disorder) pride of place in reducing street crime, is ineffective (Hess 1999; Kelling/Coles 1996). To be sure, there are close links between social deprivation, urban disorder, and crime, but concentrating on disorder as the main cause of crime ignores the direct relationship between, on the one hand, the spatial concentration of social deprivation, the associated weakening of social cohesion, and the strengthening of subcultural orientations among juveniles and, on the other hand, the greater propensity for violence and fear of crime that results. This view is supported by new research findings from Chicago, which show that there is no causal link between disorder and crime if neighbourhood structural and social problems underlying the two phenomena are taken into account (Sampson/Raudenbush et al. 1999: 626 f.).
Remarks on Crime Prevention from a Criminological Perspective
The empirical findings presented here permit an important initial conclusion: dramatisation of the situation is justified by developments in neither "objective" nor the "subjective" security. A not easily definable rise in (violent) crime is almost entirely limited to children and adolescents - an age group admittedly at particular risk from a developmental point of view. This vindicates the current practice of focusing on these age groups in crime prevention. What is more, the limited spatial distribution of juvenile delinquency and of the fear of crime within cities suggests a need for greater spatial concentration of crime prevention measures. This, too, is common practice. Conversely, this also means that many prevention campaigns in smaller, rural communities must be seen as less urgent; and any clear focus on crime and insecurity is often lacking for want of corresponding problems.(5)
Just as numerous and diverse as the causes of crime and the factors that influence it are the approaches taken to prevent it, which, especially as far as primary prevention is concerned, cannot be easily isolated from other areas of national and local policy. Concrete measures are often neither new nor exclusively directed towards crime reduction. What is new, however, is the strategy to achieve greater effectiveness with the aid of "crime prevention councils" and "public order partnerships" than could be attained with isolated measures by bundling activities and coordinating the contributions of various players - true to the principle: "only everything works" (Sherman 1997: 3-8).
Science is making an increasing effort to provide systematic aids for practical crime prevention (BMI/BMJ 2001: 455-472; Rössner et al. 2002; Sherman et al. 1997). However, the decisive question of empirically verifiable effectiveness remains largely unanswered in Germany, because there is practically no evaluation research in this country that satisfies systematic and methodological standards (on the methodological status see Farrington/Welsh 2001; Lipsey/Cordray 2002). The commendable "Düsseldorf Report on Crime Prevention" (Rössner et al. 2002), although it exposes these shortcomings, could do little towards remedying them owing to the lack of empirical studies. The minimum methodological requirements for meaningful evaluation research include setting theoretically well-founded and specific goals, forming experimental and control groups (most usefully in random distribution), and carrying out data collection before the start and after termination of the preventive measures (Sherman 1997: 2-16). This is the only way to discover relationships between causes and effects and to distinguish the effects of preventive measures from those of external influences. Two current projects in local crime prevention that follow these basic principles are "Chicago's Alternative Police Strategy" (Skogan/Hartnett 1998) and the "Communities That Care" programme carried out in a number of countries (France/Crow 2001).(6)
The hurdles that have to be taken in empirically proving the effectiveness of crime prevention are, however, high, since the effect which societal factors scarcely amenable to influence have on crime and on the fear of crime is always far greater than that of the preventive measures taken. This is shown not only by the considerable fluctuations in crime and the fear of crime in Germany over recent years but also by the remarkable decline in crimes against life in the United States in the 1990s, of which all that can be safely said is that it cannot be attributed to targeted crime prevention (Blumstein et al. 2000). However, if one renounces any attempt to assess prevention concepts in terms of effectiveness, crime prevention would be reduced to a symbolic policy primarily intended to impress the public. Finally, evaluation research facilitates the efficient allocation of scarce funding. For example, a current British meta-evaluation on the effectiveness of CCTV surveillance comes to the conclusion that it has not clearly reduced crime and that it is even less effective than improved street lighting (Farrington/Welsh 2002; Welsh/Farrington 2002). CCTV reduced crime - but not violent crime, only car theft and theft from vehicles - by an average 4 per cent, whereas improved street lighting lowered crime by an average 20 per cent, at a fraction of the cost! However, whether these important findings lead to any adjustment in crime prevention concepts, which in the United Kingdom rely very heavily on closed circuit television surveillance systems, is a decision not for researchers but politicians.
Notes
(1) A useful introduction to the subject matter is provided in the Internet by the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (Bundeskriminalamt) (http://www.bka.de/infopool_de.html) and the German Forum for Crime Prevention (Deutsches Forum für Kriminalprävention) (http://www.kriminalpraevention.de). In the English-speaking world, the following sites are to be recommended: http://www.preventingcrime.org and http://www.crimereduction.gov.uk. (back)
(2) "True" is put in inverted commas because no objective definition of crime is possible and for many offences it depends on the victim's interpretation whether an incident is to be treated as a criminal offence or not. (back)
(3) The studies were conducted in the context of the project "Social Problems and Juvenile Delinquency in Ecological Perspective" (Ob 134/3-1 and 2) sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I would like to thank the statistical offices of the participating municipalities and the Rhine-Sieg Transport Association for making the data available. (back)
(4) Passenger counts by the Rhine-Sieg Transport Association and Deutsche Bahn AG for some 550 stops in the Cologne municipal area were used as proxy data. However, no time-dependent risk calculation is possible. (back)
(5) An example can be cited of the North Rhine-Westphalian town that distributed 1200 "pooper scooper sets" to dog owners in the context of crime prevention activities (Innenministerium Nordrhein-Westfalen s.a.: 12). (back)
(6) These programmes are available at: http://www.ci.chi.il.us/CommunityPolicing/ and http://www.communitiesthatcare.org.uk/ (back)
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