Community, Crime Control, and Collective Efficacy

Neighborhoods and Crime in Miami

By (author) Craig D. Uchida, Marc L. Swatt, Shellie E. Solomon, Sean P. Varano

Not available to order

Publication date:

30 October 2015

Length of book:

166 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498517478

Collective efficacy is a neighborhood-level concept in which community members create a sense of agency and assume ownership for the state of their local community. This concept is one of several forms of formal and informal social control that predict the overall functioning of a community. In this book, the authors examine collective efficacy and crime in eight Miami-Dade County, Florida neighborhoods, based on data they collected from across the country and in the Miami-Dade neighborhoods themselves. They discuss findings relevant to the theory of collective efficacy itself, ramifications for its use within communities, and make recommendations for future research and for translating these results into actionable, crime prevention activities.
This is a critical piece in advancing and setting the research agenda for crime and the social environment of neighborhoods. For too long, criminological research focused on programs and interventions with to little attention paid to the communities impacted by crime. Not content to just build on prior works, this book brings an important level of scrutiny to prior efforts at measuring and explaining social factors relating to crime and provides a road map both for future research and critical review of such efforts. This impressive study and important publication will guide research on how community attributes discourage or promote disorder and crime. Most importantly, it re-focuses research on the most elemental of relationships impacting crime; that between neighborhoods and the people who inhabit them.