By Sophie Davis Manon Roberts Freya Smith

Neighbourhoods — understood here as the small, local areas people identify with in their daily lives which do not necessarily align with official administrative boundaries — play a central role in shaping people’s experiences of crime and safety. This is particularly true in relation to anti-social behaviour (ASB) and visible disorder. These issues, while often seen as less serious than violent crime, directly affect people’s day-to-day lives by shaping perceptions of safety, trust in institutions, and community cohesion. This paper makes the case for why neighbourhoods must be at the heart of crime policy — both as spaces where crime is experienced and as sites of potential solutions. The evidence is clear: the social and physical conditions of neighbourhoods are not incidental to crime — they help to generate it and shape how people respond to it. Poor lighting, unmanaged public spaces, and the erosion of social ties can all create the conditions in which ASB and crime thrive. Crucially, these neighbourhood characteristics can also be changed. Interventions that enhance the built environment, foster informal guardianship, and build local trust can have a preventative effect, reducing demand and improving outcomes cost-effectively. Over the past three decades, policy has increasingly acknowledged this link with initiatives such as Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, neighbourhood policing and the Safer Streets Fund. These initiatives reflect a wider recognition that local, place-based approaches, built on strong partnerships and trust, are essential. However, the effectiveness of such approaches has often been undermined by fiscal constraints, insufficient targeting of the most affected neighbourhoods and a lack of investment in the social connections that sustain resilient communities. The government wants to ‘take back our streets’ as one of its key missions. In its June 2025 Spending Review, the government announced a new national commitment to improving 350 deprived communities, and a £240 million investment in a Growth Mission Fund — signalling a renewed commitment to place-based approaches. It was also announced that police spending power will grow by 1.7% annually, to support the government’s mission to make streets safer, complementing a pledge made in April 2025 to ‘restore local policing’ and a commitment to placing 13,000 neighbourhood police officers and police community support officers (PCSOs) into dedicated community roles. To achieve its ambitions, the government needs to ‘think neighbourhoods’: focus on areas where harm is greatest, invest in the social foundations of safety and deliver quick, visible improvements. Neighbourhood-focused approaches are not only effective, they are efficient. With limited public finances, place-based approaches offer a strategic route to delivering high-impact, low-cost crime reduction, particularly in relation to ASB and disorder. But achieving the government’s mission to ‘take back our streets’ requires more than additional police officers. It requires investing in both places and people — building social capital and strengthening cohesion — to prioritise key issues and needs at a place-based level.Summary of key findings Crime is heavily concentrated and persistent in areas of multiple disadvantage. A small proportion of geographic areas account for a disproportionate share of crime and ASB. These areas often face persistent poverty, underinvestment, and institutional neglect, which foster conditions for crime to take root and persist. Residents in these areas report significantly greater concerns about ASB, illegal drugs and safety, and feel less connected and optimistic about their communities. Disadvantage and instability reinforce each other, weakening community control. Factors such as residential turnover can interact with disadvantage to undermine social cohesion, weakening informal social control and making communities more vulnerable to ASB and crime. The built environment shapes both risk and resilience. Urban design influences crime not only by affecting opportunities for offending but also by shaping perceptions of safety, trust and community pride, and enabling more positive use of public space, including through increased natural surveillance and by supporting informal guardianship. Social cohesion and trust can act as protective factors, particularly in areas of disadvantage. Strong social bonds, shared norms, and a collective willingness to intervene (collective efficacy) can help neighbourhoods resist crime and ASB, even in deprived areas. Crime and ASB matter to communities — they act as wider signals of neighbourhood decline. Visible signs of disorder and ineffective institutional responses erode trust and community pride, reinforcing a negative cycle of decline and inse

London: Crest, 2025. 46p.

By Charles C. Lanfear, Ross L. Matsueda, and Lindsey R. Beach

An important criminological controversy concerns the proper causal relationships between disorder, informal social control, and crime. The broken windows thesis posits that neighborhood disorder increases crime directly and indirectly by undermining neighborhood informal social control. Theories of collective efficacy argue that the association between neighborhood disorder and crime is spurious because of the confounding variable informal social control. We review the recent empirical research on this question, which uses disparate methods, including field experiments and different models for observational data. To evaluate the causal claims made in these studies, we use a potential outcomes framework of causality. We conclude that, although there is some evidence for both broken windows and informal control theories, there is little consensus in the present research literature. Furthermore, at present, most studies do not establish causality in a strong way.

Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 3 (2020), pp. 97–120

By Amanda J. Aubel, Angela Bruns, Xiaoya Zhang, Shani Buggs & Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz

Living near an incident of firearm violence can negatively impact youth, regardless of whether the violence is experienced firsthand. Inequities in household and neighborhood resources may affect the prevalence and consequences of exposure across racial/ethnic groups. Findings. Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study and the Gun Violence Archive, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 adolescents in large US cities lived within 800 m (0.5 miles) of a past-year firearm homicide during 2014–17. Exposure risk decreased as household income and neighborhood collective efficacy increased, though stark racial/ethnic inequities remained. Across racial/ethnic groups, adolescents in poor households in moderate or high collective efficacy neighborhoods had a similar risk of past-year firearm homicide exposure as middle-to-high income adolescents in low collective efficacy neighborhoods. Conclusions. Empowering communities to build and leverage social ties may be as impactful for reducing firearm violence exposure as income supports. Comprehensive violence prevention efforts should include systems-level strategies that jointly strengthen family and community resources.

Injury Epidemiology volume 10, Article number: 24 (2023)