Advantages and limitations of the study

One of the most important achievement of this study is the confirmation of the presence of crime concentrations at street segment level also in Milan and consequently in Europe.

Moving from these findings, Durkheim’s original preposition which claims that the level of crime is stable in societies may be transposed to concentrations of crime at street segments.

Nevertheless, many other cities must be tested to theorise the presence of a normal level of crime at micro units of geography. In this vein, this study represents one of the first attempts to test the presence of crime concentrations outside the United States trying to find a sort of common pattern among different urban centres. Maintaining a comparative approach, this analysis places itself in the group of studies that contribute to the development of the cross-national research on urban crime. Previous literature on crime in urban environments show that Anglo-American research heavily dominate the field (Wikström 1982; Wikström 1987).

As it was reported by Wikström (1991), “much of the experience we have on urban crime is based on the North American and British research and theory”. This is why it is so important to test the Anglo-American theories and findings in other contexts such as the European one.

There is a great lack on cross-national comparative studies in criminology, although there is a great need of such research in order to understand crime and its causes (Wikström 1991, 1–2).

Adopting a comparative approach exporting theories beyond the origin territories mainly attend to understand criminal and deviant behaviour as it is manifested globally and inevitably

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yield useful insights about the control of deviant behaviours (Howard, Newman, and Pridemore 2000). Cross-national studies underline common and unique features of crime in different countries for evaluating the generalizability of theories or for generating new ones (R. Bennett 1980).

Despite the differences between U.S. and European cities, many similarities can be found in the distribution of crimes at street segment level. This represents an important insight from a comparative point of view. This is why, the present analysis builds another step in the knowledge of micro dynamics of crime occurrence in urban centres. Moreover, this step is a fundamental one because, it permits to conduct for the first time a quantitative analysis at street segment level in Europe. It also explores the micro dynamics of crime in Italy where crime at place has not yet been developed with the only exception represented by Dugato (2013; 2014).

This analysis does not draw conclusions on the general level of crime, but it differentiates between burglary and robbery, identifying them as different patterns of crime concentrations for each type of offence. Prior studies on the topic such as the ones conducted in Seattle, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and New York did not differentiate the analysis depending on different types of crime, but treated crime as a unique category. The diversification conducted by this study represents a major strength, even though it is just a first step and many other crime types need to be included in order to have a better picture of the crime situation at small unit of geography in the city.

The present study was able to find geocode and analyse a series of opportunity and social disorganization variables at a very small unit of geography. Especially in the case of social disorganization, it is quite unusual to be able to find fitting measures for these determinants at punctual level. The micro analysis of crime was born connected with the opportunity theories and the situational crime prevention approach. In this theoretical and practical framework, scholars started to geocode at punctual level not only crime events, but also situational variables that could influence crime occurrence (i.e. schools, bus stops, main roads, shopping malls, bars, bank branches, police stations). Nevertheless, this approach has been criticized because of its exasperation of the micro over the macro in the explanations of the crime

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problem. This is why an integrative approach which conjugates opportunity and social disorganization factors was chose over the mere analysis of opportunities. A theoretical integration approach will help in understanding the micro dynamics, but also analyse the surrounding context in which this micro factors are located.

Beside all the advantages, the study presents several limitations that in part were already discussed throughout these chapters. First of all, it was not possible to geocode a wide range of types of offence. As already mentioned, Italian law enforcement agencies record information on crime events with a very low level of precision compared to the United States.

On average, the geocoding percentages are around 70% for burglary and around 50% for robbery, but it was not possible to include in the analysis thefts, drug related crimes and other types of offence. To have a better understanding of the crime problem in a city, it is necessary to identify patterns among different typologies of crime. The present study includes only burglary and robbery in its analysis, but it only represents a first attempt. Indeed, an enlargement to other types of offence is needed to have a more comprehensive investigation of the crime distribution across the city of Milan.

Second of all, it was not possible to collect more data on the determinants of crime concentrations in Milan at punctual level. Form the point of view of the opportunity theory, it was not possible to geocode any data measuring the presence of juveniles and street lighting at street segments. From the point of view of the social disorganization theory, it was not possible to disaggregate at micro level any data on unemployment and racial heterogeneity. In addition, key aspects such as informal social control and collective efficacy need to be reshaped finding more variables able to express the complexity of these concepts. Two recent pieces by Braga and Clarke (2014) and Weisburd, Groff and Yang (2014) calls for the necessity of an appropriate data collection systems and measurements able to capture the characteristics of small areas such as street segments.

An improvement in the collection of punctual data could help in adding new variables to the analysis and in collecting more years in order to conduct longitudinal analysis of crime trends at the micro level. Indeed, the third limitation of this study is the impossibility to conduct a longitudinal analysis because of the lack of information on the explanatory

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variables over time. For most of the variables, it was only possible to collect information on the last available year forcing the author to conduct a non-longitudinal analysis taking into account explanatory variables as fixed in a certain point in time. Fortunately, all the variables are not supposed to vary or register big changes in the five years took into account by the statistical analysis. Nevertheless, a longitudinal approach could have led to a more precise analysis and to a better interpretation of the results of the crime distribution in Milan over the years.

According to the opportunity theories, it is fair to conclude that time plays an important role when looking at crime at place dynamics. Time is meant as time of the day, time in a month or time in a year underling the importance of the seasonality in crime and space analysis. This study do not explore different time patterns in the distribution of burglaries and robberies. Further research should address also this issue in order to find similarities in time patterns and drew conclusions on the distribution of crime during the day or during the night, in different months or in different part of the year.