CRIME AND URBANIZATION

“TWENTY years ago our front

gate used to remain open, today
not only do we keep the gate
locked, we employ guards and
have installed a security system.
This is the extent to which public
safety has deteriorated in our
lifetime.” This is the verdict of an
irate male focus group conducted
in Lahore. It turns out that
evidence supports these observations.
Clearly, big city districts are ‘crowding in’ crime.

‘Crowding in’ is happening because the same level of unemployment has a bigger
effect on crime in big city districts compared to other districts. 
Urbanisation is the increase in the proportion of people living in towns and cities.
Urbanisation occurs because people move from rural areas (countryside) to urban
areas (towns and cities). This usually occurs when a country is still developing.
Crime is an activity which is against the law and the fact that the linkage between
criminal activities and the socio-economic development of the society is undeniable.
Moreover, the relationship between crime and evolution of mankind may also be
considered a historical one as Cain (first son of Adam and Eve) committed first crime
when he murdered his brother Able because of jealousy. Due to the complex nature of
the subject of crime, for example, regarding its causes and consequences, various
academic disciplines such as criminology, sociology, geography, psychology and
demography study it from their own perspective. A relatively new emerging field,
however, is the economics of crime which tries to identify the socio-economic causes
and consequences of criminal activities in a society.

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 Since the process of urban growth is known as urbanisation. Economic growth,
specialisation, and industrialization are all connected to urbanisation theories. The
transition of employment from the rural to the urban or industrial sectors is a
fundamental characteristic of urbanisation. In other words, urbanisation is a sign of
how the economy is developing industrially. The fundamental pillars of urbanisation
include labour market integration, trade in commodities and services, knowledge
diffusion, high levels of income, and economic ties. This kind of development aids in
reducing poverty in metropolitan areas and creating jobs. According to theories,
urbanisation is beneficial for fostering industry expansion and economic growth.
Given that crimes typically happen in big cities and urbanised areas, the opposite side
of urbanisation may be the encouraging of crime. Due to the reduced population
density in rural locations, criminals have less opportunities to conceal their identities.
When it comes to cities, the reverse is true. The fundamental characteristics of crimes
in urban areas are the dwindling chances of recognition and arrest. As a result, it is
argued that as urbanisation grows, crime also expands, and that greater urbanisation is
a sign of greater crime. This is a widely held observation around the globe. Due to
significant industrial development, the pace of urban population growth is increasing
globally. According to studies, in 2000, 47 percent of the world's population lived in
urban regions, up from 30 percent in 1950. In 2030, it is predicted that this percentage
would reach 60%. Similar to other nations throughout the world, crimes are rising
quickly in Pakistan. It might be a result of urbanisation as well as some other
socioeconomic and economic aspects.
Several researches indicate that there is a positive association between
urbanisation and crime in Pakistan. Moreover, unemployment, inflation, and income
inequality are also important determinants of crimes. Education, on the other hand, is
found to have a negative effect on criminal activities. For the purpose of robustness of
results, three models are estimated using various variables. According to the Lahore
Crime Survey by the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS),
victims and communities in Punjab's major cities have less knowledge about offenders
and are less able to recognise them for the police. Only 19% of victims were able to
provide any useful information on their attackers, according to the crime survey. The

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"urban anonymity dilemma" is what we refer to as. This problem explains why
Punjab's big metropolis districts have twice as many untraced offenders in registered
cases as other districts do.
By decreasing the quality of the investigation and making it more difficult to
quickly catch the appropriate culprits, the urban anonymity challenge reduces
deterrence in large cities. Additionally, it lessens deterrence because if criminals are
not named in the FIR, there is little probability that they would be punished.
The work of Becker typically has the greatest impact on the economics of
crime (1968). He provided a model and made the case that someone will commit a
crime if the expected benefit outweighs the benefit he may receive from devoting his
time to other legal pursuits. Every criminal bears the costs of law enforcement, as well
as the physical and psychological rewards of crime. Costs are mostly determined by
two factors. One is the likelihood of being caught, and the other is the penalty if you
are. He spent most of his time developing laws that would increase the expense of
criminal activity.
Similar to this, there are other macroeconomic factors that have an impact on
crime. The top factor among those is unemployment. Ehrlich claims that
unemployment is a sign of potential for money in the legal field. When a result,
people's involvement in the legal industry declines as the unemployment rate rises.
The primary distinction between the aforementioned two studies was that Becker
looked at implicit costs and benefits as well as opportunity costs in a society, while
Ehrlich looked at employment as a sign of the availability of money in a society.
Gumus has conducted additional empirical research on the relationship between crime
and its causes in metropolitan settings (2004). In major US cities, he exploited two
different categories of crime.
First, he counted all property crimes, and then, as a dependent variable, he used
major crimes like murder, forced rape, and robbery. He discovered that urbanisation
and income disparity are significant contributing variables to urban crime using cross-
sectional data from major US cities. The likelihood of being apprehended and being
recognised is significantly reduced in metropolitan settings, and families are less intact
there.

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 In Pakistan urbanisation is a serious matter because in 2030 urban population
will rise by 140 percent almost. This type of fast growth in urbanisation will create
unemployment in youth and change the mind of people towards crimes. Urbanisation
is not bad in itself because people have the right to improve their living standard and
find suitable jobs which is more in urban areas.
Keeping in mind the aforementioned debate an equation was formulated:
Crime = f (Urbanisation, Unemployment, Inflation, inequality, education)
Both the social and pure economic drivers of crime are taken into account in
the equation above. More significantly, this equation also takes into account a
demographic factor (urbanisation). These factors are supported by theory and have
been extensively used in empirical studies in the criminal justice literature. The
majority of empirical investigations came to the conclusion that these factors play a
significant role in predicting criminal activity in the analysed regions. The
urbanisation factor is the first one. Crime may increase as a result of uncontrolled
urbanisation, as is the case in Pakistan.
The second explanatory variable is unemployment, and it is noted that if a
person is jobless, he must find alternative means of obtaining income. Additionally,
the opportunity cost of committing a crime is also cheap for a jobless person, which
may push him to engage in illicit activity. As a result, unemployment might reduce
crime. Inflation is the second economic variable, and it is calculated by using CPI
growth. The real income of individuals typically drops when prices rise. In the context
of the aforementioned explanation, it is simple to draw the conclusion that inflation is
a significant predictor of crime and may have both good and negative effects.
The following two factors are socioeconomic. The first is income disparity, and
the second is education.
Another significant element that may have an impact on crime is income
disparity. People with low incomes are said to wish to adopt the lifestyle of those with
high incomes if inequality increases. Low income groups cannot maintain a greater
standard of living through lawful employment. Education is the last factor. Through
pay, education can lower the crime rate.

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 In general, education is the key to increasing a person's salary. There are two
strategies to minimise crime through education. The first approach is that having a
strong education raises the opportunity cost of crime because it takes time to commit a
crime, time that cannot be spent for other productive activities like working in the
legal field where a good education guarantees greater career prospects. The criminal's
wasted time while in detention or a jail cell comes in second. Since he can earn more
money by using his time in other ways, the cost to the criminal is very significant.
Evidently, since the beginning of industrialization and the urbanisation of
civilization, crime has been an integral part of urban life and has become a serious
worry for law enforcement, municipal governments, and city residents from pre-
industrial society to the present. These impoverished districts with increased
population density and higher youth unemployment encourage higher rates of crime in
a direct relationship with population growth and rapid urbanisation. Regions, nations,
and even regions within a country and/or areas within a city have varying levels of
crime and violence.
As 'crime' is multi-factorial, meaning that its causes, drivers, hazards, and
protective variables are location-specific and impacted by historical, political, cultural,
socioeconomic situations, etc., it is still very challenging to rationalise it.
There are typically two categories in the academic literature on urban crime.
Studies that contrast cities do so in an effort to determine why some have higher crime
rates than others. Additionally, there are studies that concentrate on elucidating
variances in crime rates among cities. However, in order to make sense of their
findings, both categories of studies rely on similar social dynamics and beliefs. Urban
crime is mostly studied using the conflict, subculture, and social disorganisation
theories.
The social disorganisation theory looks at how a city's and a neighborhood's
features affect crime rates. This viewpoint has its origins in the research done by
academics at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. These researchers were
interested in how neighbourhood structure relates to crime rates. Shaw and McKay in
particular were among the classical Chicago School thinkers who were particularly
concerned with the negative consequences of racial and ethnic heterogeneity,

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residential mobility, and poor socioeconomic position on a community's capacity to
deter crime.
Although criminologists generally agree that urban areas have greater crime rates than
rural areas, it is less clear why some urban settings experience higher crime rates than
other urban settings. That is, there is significant variance in crime levels throughout
metropolitan spaces; not all cities or districts experience the same levels of crime and
violence.
Relationship between Crime and Urbanization
“Sociologists such as Émile Durkheim (1897) and Max Weber (1958) wrote about the
changes that occurred as a result of the transition of societies from agrarian... ...and
village-based forms to industrial and urban-based ones.
They proposed that during rapid social change, growing and expanding cities would
be hotbeds of crime.”
Crime is a social disease. It destroys our social life and our basic production
Urbanization has created much scope in this factor. From old time to today's modern
societies, crime has always been a hot subject and kept its place in every day's agenda.
In particular, as and development of countries increase, in general, from to another, it
is expected that crime rate should decline over time. However, it does not decline, and
it has become more important in the second half of this century. It is pointed out years
ago that "Crime has probably become more important during the last forty years'.
Every society has its own values system. Crime is defined by mainly the values
system. For one reason or the other, there has been crime in every society throughout
history though the role, typo, cause, and effect on each society might be highly
different. While 30 percent of world population was living in urban areas in 1950, it
was about 47 percent in 2000, and estimated to reach 60percent in 2030. Therefore, it
is crucial to understand the relationship between crime and urban areas Urbanization
is a newly invented matter, but crime isn’t but there are huge number of relation
between crime and urbanization. In urban area is full of facility which facility is
responsible for occurrence crime in urban area. Relationship between crime and
urbanization may be uncertain. Closer proximity of and finally, with even
urbanization, crime may rise because individuals may not identify whether they are

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engaged in a legal or illegal activity. It is found positive relationship between city size
and. Thus, we can say that urbanization may have both negative and positive effects
on crime in different urban setting. It needs an empirical investigation to see which
effect outweighs.
Causes of Crime in the Cities
 Growing materialism
 Consumerism
 Competition in everyday life
 Selfishness
 Lavishness
 Appalling Socio-economic Disparities
 Rising Unemployment
 Feeling of loneliness in the crowd
Urbanization has also brought new challenges in terms of conflict, violence and urban
Governance - and citizen security in particular. Urban crime concept has developed
from the nature of crime. If we notice the nature of crime so it will be dear to us the
consequences of crime. Many of the population suffer from urban crime. Especially
young people who involved in this crime.
Pakistan has the highest rate of urbanization in South Asia. According to the 2017
Population Census, 36.4 percent of the population lives in urban areas. In 1998, this
figure stood at 32.5 percent. Other estimates, based on a modified definition of
urban settlements, suggest that the ratio of urban to rural population could be 40.5
percent and even higher. The United Nations Population Division estimates that, by
2025, nearly half the country's population will be living in cities. However, recent
research suggests that the relationship between urbanization and growth is not
automatic. Urbanization in many developing countries has occurred without growth,
jobs and productivity.
In this context following thre theories also attest the presence and causes of crime in
urban areas
 Chicago Scool of thought
 Strain theory

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  Social learning theory
In context of Pakistan
Crime is an old word in the context of Pakistan. Rome ancient time to present time it
available in Pakistan.
Different types of crime have speeded in all over the country. If we notice in the
village of Pakistan here crime patterns are different. Because here urbanization is
absent. Urban environment is totally favorable to occur crime. But rural environment
doesn't favorable occur crime. We know that there are many facility of urbanization.
Urbanization gives the opportunity to communicate with other countries very easily.
Foreign culture is available. We can enjoy other cultural from the help of
urbanization. In the other hand urbanization gives the negative effect on our social
life. In the urban society men become criminal. Because in the urban area police
system become corrupted, Judicial system also becomes corrupted. Many common
people face crime by new process. Some crime which crime is created by
urbanization. Such as Mobile phone threat, video pornography, murder, and
cybercrime. All crime is created by urbanization. In the ancient time there was not
availability of mobile phone, there was absent of corrupted judicial system, corrupted
police system etc. In the present era we can identify that school going girl are faced
eve-teasing by mobile phone. Some of the corrupted people catch video pornography
by illegal way. And the development process of the country is destroyed by these
types of crime. If we want to develop our country is following developed countries so
we have to recover all types of crime from city area.
Crimes Mostly Associated With Urbanization
 Street crimes
 Larceny /theft
 Drug trafficking
 Violence against children and women
 Gangs formation
 Gambling
 Terrorism
Major Causes/Reasons

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  Poverty
 Unemployment
 Poor religious bond
 Poor socialization (lack of family values)
 Social needs
 Lack of opportunities
 Poor informal and formal control
 Working parents
 Ignorance
 Fear
 Selfishness
Globally, it is estimated that cities generate about 80% of the gross domestic product
(GDP). Cumulatively, cities in Pakistan generate 55% of the nation's GDP. Multi-
dimensional poverty in cities is also generally lower compared to that in rural areas.
However, income inequality and limited access to mobility and resources such
as water, job opportunities and housing are growing problems in every major city of
the country.
The phenomenal increase in urbanization in Pakistan may be attributed to two major
causes which include natural growth in population and internal migration/relocation.
Recommendation
There are many problems in urban area. Crime is the major problem in urbanization.
Every citizen should concern about this problem. Pakistan is a developing country,
and it's an over populated country. Many populations involved in different types of
crime. some recommendations are noted here
 Urban citizen should concern about urban crime.
 Uneven urbanization must be discouraged.
 Development of rural areas with necessary social and civic facilities.
 Counseling programs to improve the bonds between society and religion,
norms and values.
 Government should take different preventive steps by promoting the formal
control(such as patrolling ,stop and frisk operation).

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  Crime related journal should broadcast in media.
 Daily newspapers should publish pure and truthful news.
 Police has to play an important role to recover crime from urban area. Judicial
system will run without political handicapped.
 Pakistan can participate in crime related convention with developed countries.

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