Crime is a very complicated topic and is typically doesn’t occur in certain locations for no reason and more than likely, there are certain locations that are full of crime while others have barely any. Most people who live in cities or even small towns know where the crime filled and non-crime filled parts are. Criminologists throughout the past decades have been trying to explain crime and why it occurs in some places and not others and what causes it.
The social disorganization theory, created by Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McKay in the mid 1900s, is likely the most well known ecological model used to explain patterns of delinquency across neighborhoods in Chicago. There are two dominant community-level perspectives on crime, one being the systemic model and the other being collective efficacy theory. The systemic model was created by Robert Sampson and Groves which claims that if the stability in a neighborhood is high, then attachment will deepen and individuals will become more involved. The collective efficacy theory is described to be the link between individuals social attachment in a community and willingness to protect each other to reduce crime rates.
Both of these perspectives, collective efficacy and the systemic model, both emphasize the importance of neighborhood levels of informal social control. In the 1920s and 1930s, criminologists at the University of Chicago were observing Chicago neighborhoods and noticed the effects of increasing urbanization, immigration, and industrialization on social organization. Specifically, Park and Burgess (1925) were the ones to study how these changes effected the city and neighborhoods. They were the ones to create the human ecology theory called concentric zone theory which explains why certain groups of individuals are in specific urban areas. They ultimately came to the conclusion that social disorganization is caused by individuals leaving the city, causing buildings to be abandoned and deteriorated.
When Shaw and McKay became interested in the topic as well, crime was not integrated in the previous research done by Park and Burgess. They decided to take the concentric zone theory and apply it to delinquency theory and collect a considerable amount of data in Chicago neighborhoods. They determined that certain locations have a significant amount of delinquency because they were in close proximity to high rates of poverty, racial heterogeneity, and residential mobility. These studies ultimately formed the fundamentals of the future social disorganization theory. With this theory, it is important to note that the individuals are not the one who are “disorganized”, but the neighborhoods in which they live, and the characteristics of the environments of these individuals are indirectly related to the crimes being committed.
The social disorganization theory has faced various criticisms like the measurement of social disorganization as a whole, what is technically considered a neighborhood, and the reliance on official data. Shaw and McKay struggled at times describing the difference between their inference regarding the theory and the actual disorganization. Throughout the development of this theory, there has been confusion on the actual definition of the theory because Shaw and McKay never truly defined it. Second, there has been speculation about what is considered a “neighborhood”. If you ask different people their definitions of the term, there might be many different answers. Basically, researchers need to have a specific way to measure a neighborhood for future experiments so they are are equal. Lastly, the theory is heavily dependent on official data. This is a problem because because of certain characteristics of an environment, it could be considered a “hot spot” for police, meaning there could be over policing in one area and not another. This can be challenging because if the theory relies on official records, then there could be a bias towards certain locations causing the data to be skewed in a sense.
As a result of the social disorganization theory becoming less and less relevant as time went on, the systemic model of social disorganization came about in the late 20th century. This new theory went in deeper detail about the original social disorganization theory in ways that Shaw and McKay didn’t. It further explains that the levels of the locations informal social control is the most important factor that is the cause of various crime rates and also claimed that informal social control determines the level of social ties within neighborhoods.
There was a new interest in addressing previous problems with the original theory throughout the late 1900s and because of the availability of the NCVS, National Crime Victimization Survey, the social disorganization theory was again viewed as something worthy of researching. This new view of social disorganization depended on the “systemic” definition of community, creating the name of this theory. “The systemic view of community developed in contrast to earlier characterizations that viewed modern urban life as comprising mostly highly segmented, impersonal, and superficial relationships” (Cullen) and this theory claimed that the ability of a group of people to supply informal social control, is caused by the friendships and bonds created by the residents. These bonds are largely determined by community characteristics like poverty, racial/ethnic heterogeneity, and residential instability and environments with high rates of these characteristics are less likely to have these bonds needed to provide informal social control.
In 1995, the hypothesis that the collective efficacy theory will result in reduced violence was tested on 8782 residents of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago. Collective efficacy is the theory that social cohesion among neighbors in combination with their eagerness to involve themselves to protect other individuals in their neighborhood on behalf of the common good, although this is largely dependent on the mutual trust between neighbors. If there was a high residential mobility rate throughout a neighborhood, it would be hard to those individuals to bond with the new or remaining members around them and build up enough trust to want to intervene and protect each other.
Personally, I believe that collective efficacy is the better theory of the two. This theory was better researched in my opinion because of the large amount of individuals and locations that were studied. Also, the systemic theory was just an underdeveloped version of collective efficacy and was overall just harder to understand and the results of the collective efficacy theory were more thoroughly collected. It was found that “a measure of collective efficacy yields a high between-neighborhood reliability and is negatively associated with variations in violence, when individual-level characteristics, measurement error, and prior violence are controlled” (Sampson, Raudenbush, Earls). What I really like about this theory is that it can be studied in many different locations, not just neighborhoods. There is a study that takes this theory and applies it to schools and researches how students and teachers feel about each other and how that relates to achievement in education, and I think it is very interesting that this theory can be changed and applied to other studies.
Shaw and McKay made extremely important contributions to criminology with their social disorganization theory. They donated to the understanding of the dispersion of crime throughout geographic locations, but specifically neighborhoods and communities. The results of the study are extremely apparent today as they were in the early 1900s when criminologists were interested in how large communities, like the city of Chicago, go through changes and how they effects crime rates throughout those communities.