Introduction.

With recent headlines like tatort grossstadt (scene of the crime – the big city), the German media, like the media in other western countries, frequently remind a fearful public that big cities cause crime. Even though a considerable body of sociological theory has supported this near article of faith in the belief systems of contemporary Europeans and Americans and has been preached again and again in popular magazines, newspapers, and college textbooks in developed countries for more than a hundred years, its empirical foundations are less than secure. To be sure, crime and violence levels have increased significantly in the last decades of the twentieth century in major German cities such as Berlin, Cologne, and Frankfurt, just as they have in Amsterdam, Stockholm, Detroit, Washington, and many other large European and American cities. But are these increases part of a consistent pattern of inexorably rising levels of urban violence and criminality, or are they likely to be of a temporary nature like other crime waves of the past? Is there something inherent in the nature of urban civilization that is particularly crime inducing? Have urban-crime levels always been higher than suburban and rural levels? To what extent are the cities themselves the causes of their own problems? What role has political bias against urban populations had in the genesis of urban crime? How different are contemporary Germans' fears of urban crime from those of people in other societies, and indeed from those of their own ancestors? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]