Geographies of Crime and Collective efficacy in urban Ghana

Abstract

Geographies of Crime and Collective Efficacy in Urban Ghana. Territory, Politics, Governance. The quest to understand how urban neighbourhood characteristics impact on crime has become an important theoretical and policy-relevant component of contemporary criminology thinking and a potential gauge for the relative value of informal and formal mechanisms of social control. This renewed interest and vigour stems, in great part, from recent works which use social disorganization theory as a spring board to examine the mediating effects of collective efficacy on crime-growth rates. The recent preeminence notwithstanding, the situation in less-developed countries remains under-researched and poorly understood, a situation partly attributable to the dearth of official disaggregated data at the community level. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge by drawing on our empirical study in Accra, Ghana. Our analytical results reveal that crime opportunities are neither uniformly nor randomly organized in space and time, and provide consistent support for lower levels of violent crime in neighbourhoods with higher levels of collective efficacy. While raising concerns about a rigid dichotomy between ‘safer’ and ‘incubator’ crime communities, we also caution that such practices can mislead policy-makers and preclude attempts at devising practical preventive interventions.