The Geography of Crime: Placing Geographers in the Space of Criminologists

The Geography of Crime consists of five articles. The first article, Exploring opportunities for geographers to explain the spatial distribution of crime, serves as a key conceptual link between each of the other four articles. This paper provides a broad introduction to the dissertation showing what gaps in the crime literature exist, especially those ripe for analysis by geographers. Three primary directions emerged as a focus of this dissertation: overarching theoretical contributions, specialized geographic quantitative techniques, and qualitative approaches centred on the concept of place. The second article, Connecting social disorganization theory to broken windows and routine activities proposes a framework for addressing how Broken Windows Theory (BWT), Social Disorganization Theory (SDT), and Routine Activity Theory (RAT) conceptually relate to one another. The paper results in a concept map integrating these three theoretical approaches to addressing the spatial distribution of crime. The third article, Spatial regression of juvenile delinquency: Revisiting Shaw and McKay explores how modern statistical techniques impact the results obtained by Shaw and McKay (1969) in the founding of SDT. The paper validates Shaw and McKay’s core findings demonstrating why SDT has become and still is, an important theoretical perspective explaining neighbourhood crime. The fourth article, The social disorganization of intimate partner violence delves into theoretical considerations asking how can SDT help to explain intimate partner violence (IPV). This paper proposes how SDT can work as a theoretical framework to explain the spatial distribution of IPV. The fifth article, Distinct places to address intimate partner violence asks how Brantford social service providers use the concept of place to address IPV. This paper shows place, as uniquely defined by geographers, reveals some innovative ways Brantford social service agencies are addressing IPV