Edited version of paper presented at the Seminario Internacional:

“Politicas De Prevencion Del Crimen Y La Violencia En Ambitos Urbanos”

Bogotá, Colombia, May 22-23, 2003

URBAN DISORDER, CRIME, AND

NEIGHBORHOOD COLLECTIVE EFFICACY

Robert J. Sampson*

*Professor of Sociology, Harvard University (Email: rsampson@wjh.harvard.edu)

The motivation to understand the neighborhood context of crime and disorder is

compelling. In the United States, social characteristics vary widely and systematically

across communities along core dimensions of socio-economic status (e.g., poverty,

wealth, occupational attainment), family structure and life cycle (e.g., female-headed

households, child density), residential stability (e.g., home ownership and tenure), and

racial/ethnic composition (e.g., racial segregation). Inequality across neighborhoods is

deep and pervasive. A long history of research also shows that crime and violence vary

systematically by community, often in conjunction with socioeconomic characteristics.

As far back as the 1920s, U.S. neighborhoods characterized by poverty, residential

instability, and dilapidated housing were found to suffer disproportionately high rates of

crime, violence, mental illness, physical abuse, and other factors detrimental to health.

As seen in Figure 1, the clustering of crime continues to the present day. The strong

ecological concentration of homicide suggests the existence of “hot spots” for crime.

ASSESSING SOCIAL MECHANISMS AND NEIGHBORHOOD PROCESSES

These findings yield a potentially important clue in thinking about why it is that

communities and larger collectivities might matter for crime. If "neighborhood effects"

of concentrated disadvantage on crime exist, presumably they stem from social processes

that involve collective aspects of neighborhood life, such as social cohesion, spatial

diffusion, local support networks, informal social control, and subcultures of violence.

Yet we know little about these and other social mechanisms, especially how to measure

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them at the community level (Mayer and Jencks, 1989; Sampson et al., 2002). An

emerging body of research has therefore begun to explore how community social

processes bear on crime and violence. A major challenge for this agenda is to build

strategies for direct measurement of the social mechanisms and collective properties

hypothesized to predict health. As interest in the behavioral sciences turns increasingly

to an integrated scientific approach that emphasizes individual factors in social context, a

mismatch has arisen in the quality of measures. Standing behind individual

measurements are decades of psychometric and biological research, producing measures

that often have excellent statistical properties.

In contrast, much less is known about measures of ecological settings.

Neighborhood-level research is dominated by the study of poverty and other

demographic characteristics drawn from census data or other government statistics that

do not provide information on the collective properties of administrative units. I thus

believe it is important to mount a concerted methodological effort to enhance the science

of ecological assessment of social environments -- what my colleague Stephen

Raudenbush and I have labeled “ecometrics” (Raudenbush and Sampson, 1999). A major

component of ecometrics is the development of systematic procedures for directly

measuring social processes, such as in population-based health surveys and systematic

social observation of community environments. The basic idea is to take the

measurement of ecological properties and social processes as seriously as we have

always taken individual-level differences, as the long history of research in

psychometrics shows.

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Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods

The example I focus on here is drawn from a large-scale, interdisciplinary project

on which I have been fortunate to serve—the Project on Human Development in Chicago

Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Our overall goal is to understand human development in its

context. To assess theories of neighborhood context, we collected original data on social

organizational processes across a large number of ecologically defined units. The

extensive social class, racial, and ethnic diversity of the population was a major reason

we selected Chicago. Grounded in a systemic theory of the local community in modern

society, we defined neighborhoods ecologically. When formulated in this way, social

organizational processes, attachment, and identity are variable and not confounded with

the definition and operationalization of the units of analysis. Chicago’s 865 census

tracts were combined to create 343 “neighborhood clusters.” These clusters are

composed of geographically contiguous and socially similar census tracts. Major

geographic boundaries (e.g., railroad tracks, parks, freeways), knowledge of Chicago’s

local neighborhoods, and cluster analyses of census data guided the construction of the

neighborhood clusters so that they are relatively homogeneous with respect to

racial/ethnic mix, SES, density, and family structure.

Three major sources of data on community social processes were collected. First,

to gain a complete picture of the city’s neighborhoods, 8,782 Chicago residents

representing all 343 neighborhood clusters were interviewed in their homes. The plan

was designed to yield a representative probability sample of Chicago residents and a

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large enough within-cluster sample to create reliable between-neighborhood measures.

The second was systematic social observation of some 23,000 street segments in 80 NCs

selected to maximize variation in race/ethnicity and SES. This approach has used

videotaping techniques to capture aspects of micro-community environments (such as

street-blocks) that bear on health risks (e.g., garbage in the streets, public intoxication,

unsafe housing). The third method was key informant interviews with 2,800 leaders in

business, law enforcement, community organizations, education, politics, and religion.

COLLECTIVE EFFICACY THEORY

A major feature of communities that we have closely examined is the capacity of

residents to achieve social control over the environment and engage in collective action

for the common good. The motivation for this inquiry stems in part from the changed

nature of cities and the modern meaning of community. Strong ties among neighbors are

simply no longer the norm in many urban communities because friends and social

support networks are decreasingly organized in a parochial, local fashion (Fischer, 1982;

Wellman, 1979). Moreover, as Granovetter (1973) argued in a seminal essay, “weak

ties”– i.e., less intimate connections between people based on more infrequent social

interaction – may be critical for establishing social resources, such as job referrals,

because they integrate the community by bringing together otherwise disconnected

subgroups. Relatedly, urbanites whose strong ties are tightly restricted geographically,

especially in low-income communities, may actually produce an environment that

discourages collective responses to local problems (Wilson, 1987).

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To address these changes in urban reality, Sampson et al. (1997, 1999) proposed a

focus on mechanisms that facilitate social control without requiring strong ties or

associations. The common belief is that neighborhoods have declined in importance as

social units, but mainly because they are defined in terms of primary groups and therefore

thought to possess the more intimate, affective relations that characterize traditional

primary groups. Rejecting this outmoded assumption about the function of local

communities, Sampson et al. (1997) highlighted the combination of a working trust and

shared willingness of residents to intervene in social control. Personal ties

notwithstanding, it is the linkage of mutual trust and shared expectations for intervening

on behalf of the common good that defines the neighborhood context of what we call

“collective efficacy”. Just as self-efficacy is situated rather than global (one has self-

efficacy relative to a particular task), a neighborhood’s efficacy exists relative to specific

tasks such as maintaining public order.

Moving away from a focus on private ties, the term collective efficacy is meant to

signify an emphasis on shared beliefs in a neighborhood's conjoint capability for action to

achieve an intended effect, and hence an active sense of engagement on the part of

residents. The meaning of efficacy is captured in expectations about the exercise of

control, elevating the "agentic" aspect of social life over a perspective centered on the

accumulation of "stocks" of social resources (or what some call "social capital"). This

conception of collective efficacy is consistent with a redefinition of social capital in

terms of expectations for action within a collectivity. Distinguishing between the

resource potential represented by personal ties, on the one hand, and the shared

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expectations for action among neighbors represented by collective efficacy, on the other,

helps clarify the dense ties paradox. Namely, social networks foster the conditions under

which collective efficacy may flourish, but they are not sufficient for the exercise of

control. The theoretical framework proposed here thus recognizes the transformed

landscape of modern urban life, holding that while community efficacy may depend on a

working trust, it does not require that my neighbor or the local beat cop be my friend.

We do not need communities so much to satisfy our private and personal needs, which

are best met elsewhere, nor even to meet our sustenance needs, which are widely

dispersed in space. Rather, local community remains essential as a site for the realization

of public goods, such as safety, clean environments, and education for children.

Empirical Evidence

These ideas have been examined in our community survey of 8,782 residents of

343 Chicago neighborhoods in 1995. To measure the social control aspect of collective

efficacy, residents were asked about the likelihood that their neighbors could be counted

on to take action if: (i) children were skipping school and hanging out on a street corner,

(ii) children were spray-painting graffiti on a local building, (iii) children were showing

disrespect to an adult, (iv) a fight broke out in front of their house, and (v) the fire station

closest to home was threatened with budget cuts. The cohesion and working trust

dimension was measured by items that captured the extent of local trust, willingness to

help neighbors, a close-knit fabric, lack of conflict, and shared values. Social cohesion

and informal social control were strongly related across neighborhoods (r = .80), and

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were combined into a global scale of neighborhood collective efficacy.

Published results show that collective efficacy is associated with lower rates of

both current and future violence, controlling for concentrated disadvantage, residential

stability, immigrant concentration, and a set of individual-level characteristics (e.g., age,

sex, SES, race/ ethnicity, home ownership). Whether measured by official homicide

events or violent victimization as reported by residents, neighborhoods high in collective

efficacy predict significantly lower rates of violence, even adjusting for prior

neighborhood violence that may have depressed collective efficacy (e.g., because of

fear). Overall, a one standard-deviation elevation in collective efficacy is associated with

about a 13 percent reduction in the expected homicide rate. Concentrated disadvantage

and residential instability also predict lower levels of later collective efficacy, and the

association of disadvantage and stability with violence is significantly reduced when

collective efficacy was controlled. These patterns are consistent with the inference that

neighborhood characteristics influence violence in part through the construct of

neighborhood collective efficacy.

Our results also underscore the fact that collective efficacy is separate and more

important as a proximate mechanism for understanding health than dense social ties. We

examined this issue by simultaneously examining collective efficacy and a measure of

the number of friends and family that live in the neighborhood—the traditional indicator

of close or dense ties. It is true that homicide rates are lowest in neighborhoods that

possess high levels of both social ties and collective efficacy. Indeed, 41 of the 93

homicide “cold spots” (44 percent) examined by Morenoff et al. (2001) were located in

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areas that are high in both ties and efficacy. However, 31 of the cold spots (36 percent)

are located in neighborhoods that are low in ties but high in collective efficacy. Most of

the neighborhoods where low homicide rates are clustered despite the absence of strong

social ties are on the north side of the city.

By contrast, traditional perspectives on social disorganization predict that

homicide “hot spots” should be found predominantly in neighborhoods that are low in

both ties and efficacy. Yet the data show that hot spots are divided almost evenly

between neighborhoods that are low in both ties and efficacy (40 out of 103) and those

that are high in ties and low in efficacy (38 out of 103). Dense networks thus do not

appear to be necessary or sufficient for explaining homicide. Our work suggests instead

that social ties create the capacity for informal social control, but it is the act of

exercising control that is related to crime rather than the existence of social networks per

se. A summary of our theoretical argument is shown in Figure 2.

SPATIAL INEQUALITY

A third and related goal of our work has been to examine spatial dynamics arising

from neighborhood interdependence. In a recent paper we questioned the common

assumption that networks of personal ties map onto the geographic boundaries of

spatially defined neighborhoods, such that neighborhoods can be analyzed as

independent entities By contrast, most modern neighborhoods are less distinctly defined

with permeable borders. Social networks in this setting are more likely to traverse

traditional ecological boundaries, implying that social processes are not neatly contained

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in geographic enclaves. Consider as well that offenders are disproportionately involved

in acts of violence near their homes. From the routine activities perspective, it follows

that a neighborhood’s exposure to homicide risk is heightened by geographical proximity

to places where offenders live. Moreover, personal crimes are rooted in social interaction

and thus subject to spatial diffusion, as when acts of violence instigate a sequence of

retaliatory events that leads to further violence in a spatially channeled way.

There are good reasons, then, to believe that spatial dependence arises from

processes related to both diffusion and exposure, such that the characteristics of

surrounding neighborhoods are, at least in theory, crucial to understanding violence in

any given neighborhood. Contrary to the common assumption in ecological criminology,

we thus conceptualize neighborhoods are interdependent. Our findings support this

notion and establish the salience of spatial proximity and the extreme inequality of

neighborhood resources that are played out in terms of citywide spatial dynamics. The

intertwined phenomena of spatial advantage and disadvantage are seen in our mapping of

homicide “hot spots” and “cold spots” (Morenoff et al., 2001). In fact, the estimated

effects of spatial proximity were larger than standard structural covariates and an array of

neighborhood social processes. What this implies is that violence is conditioned by the

characteristics of spatially proximate neighborhoods, which in turn are conditioned by

adjoining neighborhoods in a spatially linked process that ultimately characterizes the

entire metropolitan system. Focusing solely on the internal characteristics of

neighborhoods, the default move of traditional ecological research, is thus insufficient.

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SYSTEMATIC SOCIAL OBSERVATION OF DISORDER

Another theme that I would like to address concerns observation. In the spirit of

the early Chicago school of urban sociology, I believe that direct observation is

fundamental to the advancement of scientific knowledge. In the present case, systematic

observation provides an innovative way to collect direct measures of context. By

systematic, I mean that observation and recording are done according to explicit rules

that permit replication, and that the means of observation are independent of that which is

observed (Reiss, 1971).

One of the primary obstacles to bringing independent and systematic observation

to bear on social phenomena has been methodological uncertainty, not just on how to

properly conduct observations, but on how to properly assess their measurement

properties at the neighborhood level (Raudenbush and Sampson, 1999). Another concern

has been cost, even though direct observations are potentially less expensive than

household surveys, with listing, screening, and response rates eliminated. Yet another

obstacle has been conceptual in nature, stemming from under-appreciation of the yield of

systematic observation for answering fundamental questions in criminology.

Taking seriously the idea that visual cues matter, the Project on Human

Development in Chicago Neighborhoods applied the method of systematic social

observation (SSO) to study the manifestations of social and physical disorder. By social

disorder I refer to behavior usually involving strangers and considered threatening, such

as verbal harassment on the street, open solicitation for prostitution, public intoxication,

and rowdy groups of young males in public. By physical disorder I refer to the

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deterioration of urban landscapes, for example graffiti on buildings, abandoned cars,

broken windows, and garbage in the streets. Visible evidence of disorder has long been

noted as central to a neighborhood's public presentation.

In the present, of course, a reigning criminological theory posits that minor

disorder is a direct cause of serious crime. The "broken windows" thesis (Wilson and

Kelling, 1982) argues that public incivilities—even if relatively minor as in the case of

drinking in the street, graffiti, and the literal broken window—attract predatory crime

because potential offenders assume from them that residents are indifferent to what goes

on in their neighborhood. The metaphor of broken windows is in service of the idea that

signs of disorder serve as a signal of the unwillingness of residents to confront strangers,

intervene in a crime, or call the police, such that disorder entices non-resident predators

(assumed to be outsiders, that is) to commit crime.

To address these and other issues, we developed systematic procedures for

observing public spaces. In the summer and fall of 1995, trained observers drove a sport

utility vehicle (SUV) at a rate of three-five miles per hour down every street within a

stratified probability sample of Chicago neighborhoods. The geographic unit of recorded

observation was the face-block: the block segment on one side of a street. At each

intersection a unique geographic identification code was assigned so that adjacent block

faces could be pieced together to form higher levels of aggregation. As the SUV was

driven down the street, a pair of video recorders, one located on each side of the SUV,

captured social activities and physical features of both face blocks simultaneously. At

the same time, two trained observers, one on each side of the SUV, recorded their

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observations. During the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. the SSO team produced videotapes,

observer logs, and audiotapes for every face block in each of the sampled areas. In all,

approximately 23,000 face blocks were observed. The data from the observer logs focus

mainly on land use, traffic, the physical condition of buildings, and evidence of physical

disorder. From the videotapes we coded information on physical conditions, housing

characteristics, businesses, and social interactions occurring on each face block.

The detailed findings of our study are beyond the scope of the present format.

But for those interested, a paper we published in the American Journal of Sociology

(Sampson and Raudenbush, 1999) led us to question the prevailing wisdom about the

causal connection between disorder and broken windows. To be sure, disorder is a

moderate correlate of predatory crime, and it varies consistently with antecedent

neighborhood characteristics. Once these characteristics were taken into account,

however, the connection between disorder and crime vanished in 4 out of 5 tests—

including homicide, arguably the best available measure of violence. The empirical

results tend to support the view that disorder and most predatory crimes share similar

theoretical features and are consequently explained by the same constructs at the

neighborhood level, in particular concentrated disadvantage and lowered shared

expectations for the social control of public space. Disorder and crime, in other words,

may simply be different manifestations of the same phenomenon, albeit at different levels

of perceived seriousness. A summary of our work on disorder is shown in Figure 3.

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CROSS-SOCIETAL COMPARISONS

Our research has also explored a neighborhood-level, cross-national comparison

of Chicago and Stockholm (Sampson and Wikstrom, 2003). Although Chicago and

Stockholm vary dramatically in their social structure and levels of violence, this does not

necessarily imply a difference in the processes or mechanisms that link communities and

crime. Indeed, our data analyses suggest that rates of violence are similarly linked to

collective efficacy in Stockholm as in Chicago (see Figure 4). Furthermore, collective

efficacy is positively related to stability and negatively related to disadvantage—again in

both cities and in accord with extant theory. These data are consistent with our theory

emphasizing neighborhood inequality in social resources along with variation in the

collective efficacy of residents in achieving social control. I believe these results are

applicable not just to Stockholm and Chicago, but potentially to cities such as Bogotá.

CONCLUSION

The general implication of my analysis is that there is an important role for policy

in trying to change the dynamics of communities rather than people. A broad summary

of implications is seen in Figure 5. I believe that a "collective efficacy" perspective

offers plausible and realistic insights. Perhaps the most important goal is bringing

together resident-based informal social control, local institutions, and extra-local (public

and governemntal) control as equal partners, while at the same time ameliorating the

constraints imposed by structural inequality in the form of racial segregation,

concentrated poverty, and residential instability.

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REFERENCES

Fischer, Claude. 1982. To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology

78:1360-80.

Mayer S, Jencks C. 1989. Growing up in poor neighborhoods: How much does it matter?

Science 243:1441-45.

Morenoff, Jeffrey D., Robert J. Sampson, and Stephen W. Raudenbush. 2001.

Neighborhood inequality, collective efficacy, and the spatial dynamics of urban

violence. Criminology 39: 517-560.

Raudenbush, Stephen W. and Robert J. Sampson. 1999. ‘Ecometrics’: Toward a science

of assessing ecological settings, with application to the systematic social observation

of neighborhoods. Sociological Methodology 29: 1-41.

Reiss, Albert J., Jr. 1971. Systematic observations of natural social phenomena. Pp. 3-33

in Sociological Methodology, edited by Herbert Costner. San Francisco: Jossey-

Bass.

Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. 1997. Neighborhoods

and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science 277: 918-924.

Sampson, Robert J. and Stephen W. Raudenbush. 1999. Systematic social observation of

public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of

Sociology 105: 603-651.

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Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Felton Earls. 1999. Beyond social capital:

Spatial dynamics of collective efficacy for children. American Sociological Review

64: 633-660.

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. Assessing

‘neighborhood effects’: Social processes and new directions in research. Annual

Review of Sociology 28:443-478.

Sampson, Robert J., and Per-Olof Wikstrom. 2003. Concentrated disadvantage and

violence: A cross-national analysis of Chicago and Stockholm neighborhoods.

Stanford: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, working paper.

Wellman, Barry. 1979. The community question: The intimate networks of East Yorkers.

American Journal of Sociology 84: 1201-1231.

Wilson, James Q. and George Kelling. 1982. The police and neighborhood safety:

Broken windows. Atlantic 127: 29-38.

Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass,

and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chicago Homicides,1990-1996

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Neighborhood Inequality, Social Processes and Violence

Structural Factors

Social Ties

Organizational/Institutional Factors

Collective Efficacy

Prior Violence

Violence

Spurious Association of Crime and Disorder?Figure 3:

Crime

Disorder

Spurious

(E.g., Poverty; LowCollective Efficacy)

COMMONCAUSES

Figure 4:

Collective Efficacy Predicts Violence Rate: Chicago and Stockholm, 1995

.00

2.00

4.00

6.00

8.00

10.00

12.00

-6.00 -5.00 -4.00 -3.00 -2.00 -1.00 .00 1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00 5.00

Collective Efficacy Scale

Log

Vio

lenc

e R

ate

StockholmChicago

Figure 5:

CONCLUSIONS FOR POLICY

• Reduce Concentrated Inequality

• Build Collective Efficacy

• Metropolitan Approaches to Spatial Dynamics

• Integrate Police Planning with Community