ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a descriptive survey of the behaviour of national property crime rates through time. It examines possible correlations between theft rates, city size and urban growth. Community size is a common explanation for the theft rates: theft rates are usually assumed to be higher in cities than in the countryside. The chapter focuses on the effect of material conditions and of urbanism upon theft rates. Long-range national trends are difficult to assess for Germany because of the lack of an index comparable to the French index of crimes made known to prosecutors and because of the absence of national statistics before 1882. The German statistics do come from court records, but rough checks against other data were possible. In the case of France the figures used, in spite of their deficiencies, approximate an index of crimes reported to public prosecutors and thus should avoid many of the biases inherent in court records.
