Social Disorganization Theory - Article Example

? Social disorganization theory Lecturer This paper seeks to review Barbara Warner and Glenn Pierce’s 1993 article “Reexamining social disorganization theory using calls to the police as a measure of crime, Criminology, 31”. This article looks at social disorganization theory using calls to the police in 60 Boston neighborhoods during 1980. The examined data, which are based on crime reports of the complainants instead of official reports by the police, gives room for further investigation of dissimilarities in the findings based on the data of victimization and official crime data. The rates of robbery, assault, and burglary are regressed on mobility, poverty, family disruption, racial heterogeneity, and structural density. The article has also addressed the interaction terms for poverty and mobility, poverty and heterogeneity, and mobility and heterogeneity are explored as well. The article’s result got from the study holds up the findings from recently carried out victimization studies and earlier studies of ecology using official crime counts. Structural density and family disruption, along with poverty and heterogeneity, are found to be significant ecological variables for mastering the crime rate distribution among neighborhoods (Warner and Glenn, 1993). In this article, social disorganization theory has been addressed intensively. The authors assert that social disorganization was among the prominent theories that explained crime in the earlier stages of this century. This is so because of the theory’s focus on the crime geological distribution of crime and the structural features of the neighborhoods that are related to the crime distribution. The article is also of the position that the approach of the ecology the study of crime fell, in the 1970s, out of trend. However, the ecology approach was replaced by more theories of social psychology. The authors say that several reasons for the social disorganization theory decline was in place, especially the devastating criticism that had a lot to do with the reliance of the research carried out on the official crime measures (Warner and Glenn, 1993). The article puts it that although many of the early social disorganization theory empirical examinations got support for its main ideas, the theories depended more on official crime measures (such as juvenile court referrals, arrests, and official counts of crime). It was argued in the article that the official measures of crime had a high likelihood to reflect biases in the official crime reactions because they were intended to reflect true measures of crime. This article viewed crime measures with particular skepticism when applied in relation to the communities’ characteristics. Non white and poor neighborhoods were suspected of being vulnerable especially to the inflated crime measures. The article also addresses the empirical support for criticisms provided by recent studies to this study (Warner and Glenn, 1993). Victimization data has also been reviewed in this article. The article asserts that the promise of more accurate social structural effects examination on crime and a social disorganization theory renewed interests came only with the beginning of victimization data. The findings in this article and the data collected enabled for counts of crime separately from any official crime responses, and research social disorganization theory examination using the collected data. The article also says that, though the studies of early victimization explored and examined cities instead of neighborhoods used for the majority of the studies carried out earlier, the findings of these studies nevertheless raised questions concerning conclusions based on the official data of crime. The results from the studies provided mixed support to the major social disorganization theory variables and questioned particularly the role of poverty. The article reports that Sampson (1985) detailed that mobility and racial composition were related positively to the total personal victimization and that the measures of poverty and income had weak and non significant effects when measures of family density and structure were controlled. The article reports more authors who have given mixed support of social disorganization theory through the use of victimization data. The article also says that variables such as poverty, mobility, and heterogeneity were significantly and positively related to the rates of burglary when they were the only equation predictors. The authors assert that poverty became insignificant when other variables were added to the equation. The article also documents that in an attempt to predict crime, heterogeneity and poverty had positive impacts when mobility was in the equation (Warner and Glenn, 1993). Other recent studies show that poverty affects positively rates of crime only when family structure is not included in the victimization data. The article addresses calls to the police as another crime measure providing avenue for social disorganization theory. Calls to the police as a measure of crime is based on service requests made to police. This has been used recently as a crime measure in various studies. The data used in this crime measure are based on definition of complainants of the events as coded by the operator 911. Contrary to the official crime counts, calls to the police are virtually unscreened and hence not susceptible to the biases of the police, this is the greatest asset of such data. The article also claims in its findings that such data provides the widest continuing net collection of data foe criminal events in town. The article also asserts that through the use of complainant event definition and not police report established definition, discretionary bias is avoided due to police decisions whether to file a report or not (Warner and Glenn, 1993). Summarily, the article asserts that calls to the police are just like other official crime measures as they reflect two of the three major elements of the official crime counts familiar to the police: citizen willingness to report criminal behavior, and criminal behavior. Police discretion as an element is however eliminated. This is because, as the article puts it, ecological studies have criticized the police discretion in the official counts of crime (Warner and Glenn, 1993). The article concludes that data on calls to the police are valuable for ecological theory studies. This is because call data can be aggregated easily to high level of neighborhood and are not biased by the unwillingness of the respondent to report certain kinds of incidents interviewers. References Warner, Barbara and Glenn Pierce, Reexamining social disorganization theory using calls to the police as a measure of crime: Criminology, 1993: 31. Read More