Abstract
The relationship between crime and income inequality is a complex and controversial issue. While there is some consensus that a relationship exists, the nature of it is still the subject of much debate. In this paper, this relationship is investigated in the context of urban geography and whether income inequality can explain the geography of crime within cities. This question is examined for the specific case of residential burglaries in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where I tested how much burglary rates are affected by local average household income and by local exposure to poverty, while I controlled for other variables relevant to criminological theory, such as land-use type, density and accessibility. Different scales were considered for testing the effect of exposure to poverty. This study reveals that, in Belo Horizonte, the rate of burglaries per single family house is significantly and positively related to income level, but a higher exposure to poverty has no significant independent effect on these rates at any scale tested. The rate of burglaries per apartment, on the other hand, is not significantly affected by either average household income or exposure to poverty. These results seem consistent with a description where burglaries follow a geographical distribution based on opportunity, rather than being a product of localized income disparity and higher exposure between different economic groups.
Highlights
The relationship between crime and income inequality is complex and controversial
One exception to that trend are houses in gated neighborhoods; are these a small minority overall, they are mostly located in the metropolitan area surrounding the city proper of Belo Horizonte [37], a region which was not considered in this study
Residences in these informal settlements vary in quality, ranging from improvised shacks to brick-and-mortar constructions; in general, though, they can be classified as houses instead of apartments or some other type of residence. Since these are often irregular residential areas, residences in favelas are often not listed in the real-estate registry used in this study. While this could be a source of bias for this study, ethnographic studies [38,39] have indicated that property crimes are not frequent in favelas, with most crimes being violent crimes or drug-related crimes, an observation that was supported by the reported burglaries data used in this study
Summary
While there is some consensus that a relationship exists, the nature of it is the subject of much debate, which is further intensified by its relevance to the public debate [1,2,3,4,5] In this paper, this relation is investigated in the context of urban geography: Does income inequality explain the geography of crime within cities?. This relation is investigated in the context of urban geography: Does income inequality explain the geography of crime within cities? The theoretical base for a relationship between income inequality and crime has been given by theories such as strain theory [6], relative deprivation theory [7] and the economic theory of crime [8,9]; none of these theories explicitly address the spatial aspect. Most empirical studies comparing crime rates and income inequality have been conducted at more macro-scales such as comparing cities, counties, or even whole regions or countries [1,3,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]; contrasting with that, I found only five studies analyzing this relationship at a within-city scale [20,21,22,23,24]
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