Book review: Putting Fear of Crime on the Map: Investigating Perceptions of Crime Using Geographic Information Systems
| Author | Anna Barker |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895812446117 |
| Published date | 01 July 2012 |
| Date | 01 July 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
332 Criminology & Criminal Justice 12(3)
the proportionate share of crime by nationals declined and was substituted by a rise in
crime by non-nationals, thus stabilizing or decreasing overall rates of crime. In a minority
of cases an increase in crime was associated solely with a growth in the contribution of
non-nationals. Such variations suggest that crime patterns follow a logic that is specific
to the individual country rather than there being an obvious association between increases
in the rate of immigration with criminality (p. 166).
In conclusion, this well-written book makes an original methodological and theoreti-
cal contribution to the field. Solivetti looks beneath demographic trends to answer diffi-
cult questions about offending by immigrants and the social integration of non-nationals,
with a particular focus on non-EU citizens (p. 150). The detailed analysis concludes that
alleviating poverty and having respect for civil rights and the rule of law, coupled with
tolerance and openness by the host society, will potentially block the routes through
which immigrants become involved in penal and penitentiary circuits (p. 172).
Reference
Fekete L and Weber F (2010) Foreign nationals, enemy penology and the criminal justice system.
Race and Class 51(4): 1–25.
Bruce J. Doran and Melissa B. Burgess,
Putting Fear of Crime on the Map: Investigating Perceptions of Crime Using Geographic Information Systems.
Springer: New York, 2011; 283 pp.: 9781441956460, £81 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Anna Barker, University of Bradford, UK
Putting Fear of Crime on the Map is dedicated to stimulating a ‘spatially explicit’ research
agenda on crime-specific fear. Drawing on empirical research, it makes an original con-
tribution to the ways of studying fear of crime by demonstrating the value of insights
from behavioural geography, combined with innovative spatio-temporal methodologies
and advanced geographic technologies of analysis. The central thesis is that ‘fear map-
ping has the potential to provide an additional layer of understanding, as well as more
localized and geographically relevant information than traditional statistical approaches’
(p. 82). This is hard to refute given that most traditional survey designs are ‘spatially
implicit’ (p. 80). The advantages of fear mapping, measured through avoidance and pro-
tective behaviours, are positioned as providing insights into people’s ‘spatial choices’ (p.
83) in response to crime and disorder. In doing so, Doran and Burgess seek to promote the
methodological, theoretical and policy advances that can be derived from inter-discipli-
nary research collaborations between behavioural geography and criminology. In particu-
lar, the authors underscore the significance of these collaborations in stimulating, for
example, new developments in the conceptual nexus between disorder, fear and crime by
examining their spatial and temporal coincidence, which they present as evidence in sup-
port of the often discredited ‘broken windows’ thesis. Moreover, the authors cogently
illustrate that the data visualization capacity of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to
present these relationships geographically acts as a powerful diagnostic tool for commu-
nity safety partnerships in developing effective fear and crime management strategies.
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