![]() ![]() At the other end are cases of necessity, involving otherwise law-abiding citizens who, as a result of forces beyond their control, find themselves hungry and exposed to the elements. A variety of data is presented in support of the hypothesis, which helps explain crime rate trends in the United States 1947-1974 as a byproduct of changes in such variables as labor force participation and single-adult households.Īs recent incidents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and other disasters have illustrated, the moral content of looting spans a wide continuum: At one end are predatory and exploitative acts that seem deserving of even greater punishment than ordinary acts of burglary and larceny. In particular, we hypothesize that the dispersion of activities away from households and families increases the opportunity for crime and thus generates higher crime rates. Human ecological theory facilitates an investigation into the way in which social structure produces this convergence, hence allowing illegal activities to feed upon the legal activities of everyday life. Most criminal acts require convergence in space and time of likely offenders, suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians against crime. Rather than emphasizing the characteristics of offenders, with this approach we concentrate upon the circumstances in which they carry out predatory criminal acts. In this paper we present a "routine activity approach" for analyzing crime rate trends and cycles. Using the “Rodney King Riots” as an example, I illustrate the looping interactions through which actors on the streets, law enforcement officials, and politicians and news media workers, by taking into account each other’s past and likely responses, develop an episode of anarchy through multiple identifiable stages and transformational contingencies. At a third level, we can find symmetrical, recursive interactions between the cultures used to do crime and cultures created by media, popular culture, and political expressions about crime. ![]() At the second level, there is asymmetrical interaction between those creating images of crime and those committing crime: offenders use media images to create crime, but cultural representations of crime in the news, official statistics, and entertainment are developed without drawing on what offenders do when they commit crime, or vice versa. At the first level, the culture of crime used by those committing crimes and the process of creating representations of crime in the news, entertainment products, and political position statements proceed independently. Does cultural criminology have a distinct intellectual mission? How might it be defined? I suggest analyzing three levels of social interaction. ![]()
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