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Explaining and sustaining the crime drop: Clarifying the role of opportunity-related theories

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Crime Prevention and Community Safety Aims and scope

Abstract

Western industrialised countries experienced major reductions in crime for a decade from the early to mid-1990s. The absence of adequate explanation identifies a failing of criminological theory and empirical study. More importantly, it means that none of the forces that reduced crime can confidently be harnessed for policy purposes. Existing hypotheses relating to the crime drops are reviewed and found generally wanting. Many do not stand up to empirical testing. Others do not seem able to explain crime increases (such as phone theft and robbery and internet-related crimes) that occurred alongside the crime drops. It is suggested that the set of opportunity-related theories, or the criminologies of everyday life, present a more promising line of research. The ‘security hypothesis’ is discussed wherein changes in the level and quality of security may have been a key driving force behind the crime drop, and an agenda of crime-specific research is proposed.

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Notes

  1. External validity usually refers to whether a hypothesis is valid in other settings, and is here used to refer to whether or not a hypothesis is valid in other countries.

  2. Elsewhere in his book, however, Zimring seems to dismiss the need for cross-national validation of US-based hypotheses by arguing that US crime falls were wholly different to those in other countries. He examined reported crime in Canada, France, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, but only does so for aggregate data from 1990 to 2000 (Zimring, 2007, pp. 15–16). This could obscure the fact that the crime fell at different times in different countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, the crime fall clearly came after that in the United States (see Walker et al, 2006). This may mean that Zimring compared the wrong time periods, and a recent international study would suggest that is the case:

    According to ICVS data, the level of common crime in Europe reached a plateau around 1995 and has shown a steady decline over the past ten years. The level of crime in Europe has now fallen back to the levels of 1990. Although this report focuses on crime within the EU, it seems worth mentioning here that levels of common crime have recently shown declining trends in the United States, Canada, Australia and other industrialised countries as well (van Kesteren et al, 2000). (van Dijk et al, 2005, p. 21)

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under grant RES-000-22-2386. An earlier version of this article was presented to the International Symposium on Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis in Turkey, March 2008. For comments on an earlier version we thank Ron Clarke, Chris Kershaw, Martin Killias, Jan van Dijk and John van Kesteren.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Midlands Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, Loughborough University, UK

    Graham Farrell & Jen Mailley

  2. Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, UCL, University College London, Second Floor, Brook House, 2-16 Torrington Place,, London, WC1E 7HN, UK

    Nick Tilley

  3. School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham, NG1 4BU, Nottinghamshire, UK

    Andromachi Tseloni

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  1. Graham Farrell
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Correspondence to Graham Farrell.

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Farrell, G., Tilley, N., Tseloni, A. et al. Explaining and sustaining the crime drop: Clarifying the role of opportunity-related theories. Crime Prev Community Saf 12, 24–41 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpcs.2009.20

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