The Changing Distribution of Big City Crime: A Multi-City TimeSeries Analysis.” Urban Affairs Quarterly

This article analyzes the changing relationship between the aggregate demographic characteristics of cities, their investment in policing, and officially reported rates of crime. The data are for the nation’s 32 largest cities, for the years 1946-1970. Analysis reveals that 1970 data support Louis Wirth’s contention that crime rates are highest in large, dense, heterogeneous places; however, data from earlier years indicate that this overlap is a relatively recent phenomenon. I suggest that this reflects the process of suburbanization. Since World War II, white migration out of certain central cities has encouraged social changes which have led to the current stratification of communities. This process re-sembles that which led to the formation of stratified neighborhoods within cities during an earlier era; the current covariation between demography and crime thus resembles that found at the subcommunity level 25 years ago. The growth of the crime rate is one of the major political realities of our time. Opinion surveys indicate that lawlessness and the fear of crime top the list of &dquo;most important issues&dquo; concerning residents of large cities (Washington Post, 1975). The concentra-tion of crime in poor and minority neighborhoods further in-AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank Doreen Ellis for her assist-ance in the collection of the data reported here and for her participation in the early stages of its analysis. I have profited greatly from my discus-sions with Professor Mark Levine of the state of affairs revealed by the data. Despite his efforts to aim my sights higher, this remains a study of cops and robbers. The final preparation of this manuscript was com-pleted while the author was a Visiting Fellow (Grant 76 NI-99-0032) a