ABSTRACT
Criminological theory has been dominated by the search for underlying root causes common to all deviant behavior. Some scholars have found these antecedents of criminality in the social disorganization that characterizes communities where crime rates are high. Focus upon the environments in which crime occurs has a long history in criminological study. Crimes identified by the dispatch system may represent intentional lies or a misinterpretation of events by victims, bystanders, or call takers. The debate between advocates of specific and general theories of crime causation can be directly related to the distribution of crime across places. The choice of hot spots as a unit of analysis may also be seen as masking substantial clustering of individual offense types at individual places, and thus underestimating the degree to which places evidence crime specialization. Most crime causation theories are consistent with the premise that crime is a unified phenomenon with a common set of general “causes”.
