A New Era for Hot Spots Policing

• DOI: 10.1177/1043986214525078
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Author: Charles F. Wellford,Cynthia Lum
• Date: 01 May 2014
• Subject Matter: Articles

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2014, Vol. 30(2) 88 –94

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DOI: 10.1177/1043986214525078

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Article

A New Era for Hot Spots

Policing

At the turn of the 20th century, social scientists developed an approach to understand-

ing the distribution of crime across a city that came to be called the Chicago school.

This approach—especially the work on social disorganization by Shaw, McKay, and

their colleagues (see Shaw & McKay, 1942; Shaw, Zorbaugh, McKay, & Cottrell,

1929)—began by plotting the residences of known offenders and noting their concen-

tration in certain sections of the city. Using this unequal distribution of criminality,

they and others began to develop explanations for why offenders and crime clustered

in certain locations. In particular, their ideas focused on the inability of communities

to develop norms for social control possibly due to factors such as high residential

mobility, population turnover, racial and ethnic heterogeneity, and concentrated pov-

erty—see later developments of this idea by Kornhauser (1978) and Bursik & Grasmick

(1993). The Chicago School used these explanations to develop and advocate for

crime prevention interventions (i.e., the Chicago Area Projects) that might increase

community efficacy and ties, thereby reducing crime.

Social disorganization theory could have been a precursor to modern crime and

place research and policy, including hot spots policing. However, because of its focus

on offenders, and because of a widespread belief among both practitioners and schol-

ars that place-based prevention programs would simply displace crime, the influence

of the Chicago School on criminology until the 1980s was primarily offender-based,

sociological, and dispositional (Clarke, 1980; Weisburd, 2002). Explanations for the

clustering of offenders in certain areas included how socio-economic and demographic

characteristics that were also unevenly distributed across geography, influenced

offending.

But environmental criminologists, social ecologists, and social psychologists like

Jeffery (1971), Newman (1972), and Brantingham and Brantingham (1981) began

arguing that these sociological forces were not the only explanation for geographic

crime patterns. Indeed, they asserted that the environmental context in which a crime

occurs was essential to understanding crime patterns across places. Early works on

opportunity and situational crime prevention by Ron Clarke also suggested the impor-

tance of the context of crime as well as a rational offender who responded to situa-

tional cues, in explaining crime (Clarke, 1980, 1983; Cornish & Clarke, 1986).

Clarke’s work emphasized that crime prevention could successfully target situations,

Corresponding Author:

Charles Wellford, University of Maryland, 2220 LeFrak Hall College Park, MD 20742, USA.

Email: wellford@umd.edu

525078CCJXXX10.1177/1043986214525078Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeWellford and Lum

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