Chapter 5 - The geography of property andviolent crimes in Sweden

• Chapter 5 starts showing the changing rates and geography of a selected groupof offenses by municipalities in Sweden. Police records are used as the mainsource of the analysis but reference is also made as much as possible to theNational Crime Victim Surveys. This chapter aims at improving the knowledgebase regarding the rates and spatial distribution of crimes in Sweden. Focus isgiven to shifts in geography between rural (remote and accessible) and to urbanmunicipalities (especially Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö), and vice versa.Geographical information systems (GIS) and spatial statistics techniques areused to assess concentration of thefts and violence. There is an inequality in victimizationthat is worth highlighting as trends in crime may impress differentgeographies in space.Which are the main factors behind the geography of crime in Sweden? Arethese factors in urban areas different from the ones found in rural municipalities?Following the main strand of theories in environmental criminology, the secondsection of this chapter searches for factors that can explain the spatial arrangementof crime. Crime rates are modeled cross-sectionally as a function of themunicipalities’ structural indicators, such as demography, socioeconomic conditions,and lifestyles. Note that this chapter is based on previous work publishedby the author with the criminologist Lars Dolmén in 20111 but it makes an effortto take distance from the previous study by expanding the analysis, includingdetailed analysis of property crime and updating the violence section with newstatistics. The chapter ends with a discussion of unanswered questions about thegeography of crime in Sweden and the methodological challenges of analysingthe regional distribution of crime using police recorded data at municipal level.Finally, a relevant issue that is also discussed in the final section of this chapteris the adequacy of current criminological theory in supporting the analysis ofcrime dynamics that go beyond the urban and/or neighborhood contexts.

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