Eck, John E.: Places and the Crime Triangle

Tamara D. Madensen

The fact that crime tends to cluster in particular places is widely accepted and supported by a large body of research. French scholars André-Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet were among the first to “map” crime and identify relationships between crime rates and community characteristics. Also, U.S. Chicago School researchers, including Robert Burgess and Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, examined crime patterns and discovered relationships between ecological characteristics and concentrations of criminal activity. However, these early studies ignored the heterogeneous collection of both high-crime and low-crime places that clustered together to form high-crime neighborhoods. Social scientists in the 1970s began to develop a collection of theories to explain this phenomenon. These theories form the basis of environmental criminology, often referred to as crime science . Crime science is not concerned with explaining an individual's propensity to commit crime. Instead, crime science research identifies environmental factors that create attractive crime opportunities and ...

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