Street culture and street crime

This chapter discusses the connections between street culture and street crime as articulated in the scholarly literature and assessed that scholarship. Street crime is a prevalent factor in cities and surrounding suburbs in the United States and most countries around the world. In terms of recent developments, new research has recovered culture as an analytical construct to explain street crime, this time, explaining that culture as shared norms and codes. Anderson explored the “street code” in an area of Philadelphia, which was based upon the need for respect or the search for it and a lack of confidence in the problem-solving capacity of government institutions, which generated approval of violent forms of conflict resolution. Since the 1960s, due to numerous forces an increasing number of people utilize the streets of our big cities, including associated locations like parks, parkettes, and public plazas where homeless people camp out, or street corners where gang members may gather and sell drugs.