The term crime wave has two distinct (but related) meanings in criminological and popular discourse. The most familiar meaning associates the term with relatively rapid and abrupt upward (and subsequent downward) shifts in rates of crime. A second usage suggests that the term refers not to actual crime rate increases—in any narrow sense—but to changes in levels of public fear, anxiety, and publicity surrounding the problem of crime. Whereas the former usage emphasizes an understanding of crime waves as “objective” phenomena, the latter emphasizes their “subjective” character.
As a measure of actual crime rate change, this concept has no specific, agreed-upon meaning. However, most commonly, it references crime rate variations occurring over the shorter term rather than the longer term. In this respect we can speak of crime waves in reference to relatively distinct, historically specific episodes, such as the increases in gangsterism in the Midwest during the 1930s, the nationwide post-World War II urban crime rate increase, or the rapidly escalating rates of extortionate crime that plagued Italian neighborhoods in large American cities during the first decades of the 20th century. We can assess crime waves objectively as mathematical entities through several key dimensions, including length (How long does it take crime waves to rise and fall?), shape (Do crime waves rise and fall with equal rapidity?), linearity (Do the factors that affect crime rate development have consistent effects?), and synchronicity (Is the crime wave just a local or is it a more general phenomenon?).
Efforts to explain sudden and rapid shifts in crime levels focus on processes of social change. Researchers have shown three major types of relevant variables. One group of explanations relates to various social dislocations, such as war, rapid economic change, or institutional breakdown. A second explanation focuses on the diffusion of cultural patterns. So-called copycat crimes are perhaps the clearest example of such a dynamic. A third type stresses the ways in which the various kinds of social and technological innovations facilitate the commission of crimes posing a serious challenge to the existing social control apparatus. An alternative way of thinking about crime waves is as social constructions. In other words, crimes waves can be said to exist when there are widespread public perceptions that they exist—irrespective of what more objective measures of crime level variation might indicate. In this sense, crime waves imply increased public anxiety, higher levels of media attention, and eventually more coercive forms of social control reactions. Although this meaning of crime wave might be less intuitive, it is actually the formulation with which the term has been most often associated in recent years.
A naive interpretation of the relationship between these two kinds of crime rates might suggest highly correlated empirical realities. However, this does not appear to be the case. The social dynamics that drive changes in crime rate levels appear, in many cases, to be only tangentially related to the dynamics that drive shifts in fear and perception.
Bibliography:
- Sacco, Vincent F. 2005. When Crime Waves. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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