Diverse Aspects of “High Crime Areas”

Drawing on Felson and Eckert’s Notion of “Overt Crime Areas”

Abstract

This paper examines contemporary implications of the studies on “communities and crime” in the United States. It undertakes this examination based on the presentation and discussions at the symposium of the 46th. annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Sociological Criminology, and by recounting the issues from the viewpoint of “overt crime areas,” proposed by Felson and Eckert (2018) . Their arguments on overt crime areas are characteristic in aspects such as the distinction between “overt” and “covert” crime, as well as crime and disorder, and the notion of tough neighborhoods, which are taken over by overt crime and public disorder, as “enhancers,” not “causes,” of crime. Although their arguments are highly consistent with findings in recent studies on communities and crime, and societal changes after the mid-1970s, in the United States, extra caution is necessary when applied to contemporary Japan as an analytical frame of reference.