Situational policing: neighbourhood development and crime control

Over the past two decades, the Broken Windows version of social disorganization theory has had a significant impact on law enforcement practices in the United States. Contemporary sociologists, however, have demonstrated that neighbourhood‐level collective efficacy (or a lack thereof) is a more significant predictor of violent crime than are physical and social disorder (i.e., broken windows). Collective efficacy is viewed as an evolving neighbourhood‐level property. We posit that neighbourhoods pass through, regress to, or get stuck in identifiable stages of development as they move toward (or away from) higher levels of collective efficacy. Giving consideration to both stage of neighbourhood development and level of neighbourhood crime and disorder, we construct four neighbourhood types: Strong, Vulnerable, Anomic and Responsive. The concept of “situational policing”, then, is introduced as a way to address effectively both the development of collective efficacy, and the occurrence of crime and disorder in each neighbourhood type.