Formal and Informal Crime Control: An Exploratory Study of Urban, Suburban, and Rural Orientations.

Previous studies of public apprehension about crime indicate that people hold conflicting orientations regarding the nature and extent of the problem (McIntyre, 1967). On the one hand, they feel that throughout the country as a whole and even elsewhere in their own communities, the threat of crime, especially violent crime, is severe and increasingly so. On the other hand, however, they feel that people and property in their own neighborhoods remain relatively safe, this being the case even among residents of high crime risk areas. The issue of crime deterrence, particularly in residential areas, involves a number of dimensions, depending partly on threatened and partly on actual apprehension of offenders by actions of residents and police. The threat of apprehension exercised through informal channels has been demonstrated in the work of Maetoby et al. (1958) which shows that the crucial factor differentiating high from low delinquency areas of the same lower socio-economic level is the shared expectations among neighbors that residents would intervene to prevent the commission of offenses. More recently in a study of ghetto riots, Warren (1969) has demonstrated the importance of actual informal intervention in crime deterrence, finding that the more cohesive the neighborhood, the more likely that residents attempted to prevent looting, burning, and disorder. The significance of formal controls as deterrents to crime is somewhat more problematic. Even though crime prevention is a major manifest function of police (Banton, 1964; Bittner, 1967; Wilson, 1968), one is left to assume the degree to which formal controls do deter crime, and as Blumstein (1967), for one, has stated, "although the question (of what people are deterred from eommitring what crime by what actions of the criminal justice system) is central to much of the operation of the criminal justice system, and especially to police operation, there has been no systematic attempt to answer it." Some light is shed on this issue in studies of police response to citizen complaints which show the mutual dependence of formal and informal structures for the control of crime. Black and Reiss (1970) report that the majority (72 percent) of police encounters (at least with juveniles) stem from citizen calls rather than from police-initiated action, yet the results of victimization studies reveal that this still represents only a limited proportion of all offenses reported by citizens to police (Biderman, This paper is concerned with the issue of how people view the nature and extent of crime in their own neighborhoods, and whether they attribute their area's safety (or dangerousness) to the exercise of formal or informal controls, comparing rural, suburban, and central city residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]