THE LAW OF CRIME CONCENTRATION AND THE CRIMINOLOGY OF PLACE*

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12070
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Author: DAVID WEISBURD
• Date: 01 May 2015

THE 2014 SUTHERLAND ADDRESS

THE LAW OF CRIME CONCENTRATION

AND THE CRIMINOLOGY OF PLACE∗

DAVID WEISBURD

Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University,

Institute of Criminology, The Hebrew University

KEYWORDS: crime concentration, unit of analysis, hot spots, microgeographic, crime

places

According to Laub (2004), criminology has a developmental life course with specific

turning points that allow for innovations in how we understand and respond to crime.

I argue that criminology should take another turn in direction, focusing on microgeo-

graphic hot spots. By examining articles published in Criminology, I show that only

marginal attention has been paid to this area of study to date—often termed the crim-

inology of place. I illustrate the potential utility of a turning point by examining the

law of crime concentration at place, which states that for a defined measure of crime

at a specific microgeographic unit, the concentration of crime will fall within a narrow

bandwidth of percentages for a defined cumulative proportion of crime. By provid-

ing the first cross-city comparison of crime concentration using a common geographic

unit, the same crime type, and examining a general crime measure, I find strong sup-

port for a law of crime concentration. I also show that crime concentration stays within

a narrow bandwidth across time, despite strong volatility in crime incidents. By draw-

ing from these findings, I identify several key research questions for future study. In

conclusion, I argue that a focus on the criminology of place provides significant op-

portunity for young scholars and has great promise for advancing criminology as a

science.

In his presidential address to the American Society of Criminology in 2003, John Laub

(2004) observed that criminology as a discipline could be viewed as having a developmen-

tal life course. In turn, much like the offenders that he and Robert Sampson studied in

identifying life-course criminology (Laub and Sampson, 2003), this life course had impor-

tant turning points that fundamentally influenced the directions that the field would take.

In contrast to continuity in the intellectual trajectory of the discipline, a turning point

∗This article is based on my Sutherland Lecture at the American Society of Criminology meetings

in San Francisco in 2014. I want to thank Breanne Cave, Matthew Nelson, Shai Amram, and Alese

Wooditch for their assistance in preparing this address. I am especially indebted to Alese Wooditch

who helped me prepare the data and develop the analyses for examination of crime concentration

across cities. I also want to thank Barak Ariel, Anthony Braga, Frank Cullen, Charlotte Gill, Liz

Groff, Joshua Hinkle, John Laub, Stephen Mastrofski, and Daniel Nagin for their thoughtful com-

ments on the article. Direct correspondence to David Weisburd, George Mason University, 4400

University Drive, MS D12, Fairfax, VA 22030 (e-mail: dweisbur@gmu.edu).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12070

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 2 133–157 2015 133

134 WEISBURD

refers to a radical new way of viewing criminology, which allows us to stake out new terri-

tory and to make significant new discoveries about crime and criminality. My argument in

this article is that it is time for criminology to take another turn in direction. The change

is embedded not in a particular theory but in the units of analysis that criminologists fo-

cus on. The first major turning point that Laub (2004) identified in American criminology

was also concerned with units of analysis. The fundamental changes in our understand-

ing of the crime problem that came from the Chicago School of Criminology were linked

strongly to their insights about the importance of communities in understanding crime

(e.g., Shaw and McKay, 1942). In this article, I suggest a new turning point, not about

communities but focused instead on microgeographic crime hot spots.

The study of crime at microgeographic units of analysis began to interest criminologists

in the late 1980s (Evans and Herbert, 1989; Felson, 1987; Pierce, Spaar, and Briggs, 1988;

Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger, 1989; Weisburd and Green, 1994; Weisburd, Maher, and

Sherman, 1992). In 1989 in Criminology, Lawrence Sherman, Patrick Gartin, and Michael

Buerger coined the term criminology of place to describe this new area of study. The

criminology of place (see also Weisburd, Groff, and Yang, 2012) or crime and place (see

Eck and Weisburd, 1995) pushes us to examine very small geographic areas within cities,

often as small as addresses or street segments (a street from intersection to intersection),

for their contribution to the crime problem. It pushes us to examine and understand why

crime occurs at specific places rather than focusing our interests on the more traditional

concern of criminologists with why specific types of people commit crime.

I begin by presenting data on the dominant units of analysis in criminology. By drawing

from an examination of the journal Criminology, I find that person-focused studies have

dominated the attention of criminologists and that studies of crime at place have played

a very minor role in criminological research to date. I then turn to what may be termed

the first law of the criminology of place—the law of crime concentration—to illustrate

the tremendous potential of this approach for enhancing our understanding of crime and

our ability to inform crime control policies. In conclusion, I argue that a turning point

focusing on microgeographic hot spots is warranted in criminology because it can enhance

criminology as a science—an enterprise very much in the spirit of Edwin Sutherland.

UNITS OF ANALYSIS IN EMPIRICAL CRIMINOLOGY

What have been the dominant units of analysis in research in criminology? My stu-

dents and I investigated this question by looking at units of analysis in empirical studies

published in Criminology between 1990 and 2014.1We focus on Criminology because it

consistently is the highest impact journal in the field according to Thomson Reuter’s In-

stitute for Scientific Information Index, and it is the main journal of the largest and most

influential professional association in criminology. We identified a total of 719 empirical

articles in the journal over the last 25 years.2

Figure 1 reports on the percentage of empirical studies that were found to exam-

ine each unit of analysis. Because multiple units of analysis were reported in 121

1. I want to thank Breanne Cave, Matthew Nelson, and Alese Wooditch for their work on collecting

these data.

2. Approximately 7 percent of the articles had no empirical units and are not included in our count.

These were generally discussions of theory or nonempirical pieces, such as presidential addresses

to the society.