Dietrich Oberwittler

• Professor, Dr. phil.
• Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law

We use crowdsourced mobility data generated from smartphone GPS locations in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of spatiotemporal pattern of urban crime. The population at risk of falling victim to crime does not only consists of the resident population but also of the ambient population which can be measured thanks to the increasing...

Digital neighbourhood platforms (DNPs) – also called online neighbourhood networks or neighbourhood social networks – are still a relatively novel phenomenon, and little is known about their actual reach among citizens and about neighbourhood conditions which foster or impede their spread. We consider DNPs as a digital extension of conventional nei...

Scholars from various fields have suggested that criminal victimization can shatter generalized trust. Whereas small average effects in longitudinal studies provide only weak support for this claim, victimization effects may be stronger for specific crime types and multiple victimization. To test this assumption, we estimated various victimization...

This study examines the declining crime trend among Swedish adolescents between 1999 and 2017 using data from eight repeated cross‐sectional waves of a nationally representative school survey (N = ca. 49,000). We examined to what extent changes in parental monitoring, school bonds, attitudes toward crime, routine activities, and binge drinking were...

Objectives. We examined the effects of victimization on several aspects of well-being in a longitudinal study of a general population sample. Previous research has often been inconclusive, as it was largely based on cross-sectional data and prone to problems of unobserved heterogeneity and selection bias. We examined both between-person difference...

In a French-German study including a large survey of adolescents in four cities, we analyze the interaction patterns during stops. Based on the respondents’ reports of their last experience of a police stop/encounter, we look at the likelihood that they assessed the interaction as respectful or disrespectful, conflictual or even violent, and how ei...

Fear of crime among older people has been a frequent topic in ageing research, criminology and urban studies. The “environmental docility hypothesis” assumes that older people are more vulnerable to adverse neighbourhood conditions than younger age groups. Yet, few studies have tested this influential hypothesis using samples of respondents coverin...

Strong and viable modern states have limited the use of private force to narrowly-defined situations of self-defense. Yet, evidence from crime surveys shows that a significant proportion of violent and property crimes is not reported to police. Instead of calling the police, people either take no action or employ a variety of mechanisms, including...

Although urban disorder has played a central role in neighborhood research, its impact may have been overstated in studies relying on the subjective perception of survey respondents only. Research on the “perception bias”—defined as the divergence between respondents’ subjective assessments and systematic observations of disorder—has revealed the a...

In neighborhood research, the concept of collective efficacy has been particularly successful in capturing social cohesion and behavioral expectations among residents. Research has spread beyond the U.S. where it originated, and many studies from different countries have shown that collective efficacy is related to structural disadvantage in simila...

One of the most ro­bust pre­dic­tors of fear of crime is age: Older peo­ple tend to be more fear­ful. Yet, many ques­tions be­yond the ba­sic cross-sec­tional re­la­tion­ship re­main un­ex­plored. We in­ves­ti­gate co­hort ef­fects on fear of crime, ap­ply­ing graph­i­cal analy­ses and a ver­sion of the hi­er­ar­chi­cal age-pe­riod-co­hort (HAPC) a...

Oberwtillter and Roché (2018) Police citizen relations across the world : How societal cleavages and political contexts shape trust and distrust, legitimacy and illegitimacy

Der aus dem Griechischen entlehnte Begriff (a-nomos) bezeichnet wörtlich den Gegensatz oder die Abwesenheit von Gesetz und Ordnung und wurde von Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) zur Analyse sozialer Probleme, insbesondere abweichenden Verhaltens, infolge gesellschaftlicher Modernisierung verwendet. Seine weitere Verwendung in der Soziologie wurde maßgebl...

Abweichendes Verhalten ist der allgemeinste Begriff für sehr unterschiedliche Verhaltensweisen, die gegen gültige soziale Normen verstoßen und negative Reaktionen und Sanktionen hervorrufen können. Nach dem lateinischen Wortstamm spricht man auch von „deviantem Verhalten“ oder „Devianz“ (franz. déviance, engl. deviant behaviour). Delinquenz – abwei...

One of the key observations of delinquency research – that adolescents are more likely to offend during the time spent in the company of peers and without adult supervision – has been supported by recent studies following Situational Action Theory (SAT). According to SAT, exposure to criminogenic settings may influence adolescent behaviour by prese...

Dass Einflüsse der Lebensumwelten einen positiven oder negativen Beitrag zur Entwicklung von Kindern und Jugendlichen leisten und auch an der Entstehung von Delinquenz beteiligt sein können, ist keine überraschende Erkenntnis, auch wenn sie in den Forschungsansätzen zu Jugenddelinquenz lange Zeit keine angemessene Aufmerksamkeit gefunden hat. Effek...

During the last twenty years, police trust and legitimacy has emerged as an important academic theme and a political issue. Procedural justice during interactions with police has surfaced as a leading theory in Western nations. However, Middle-Eastern, African, and Asian case studies show a distinct pattern. And, more generally, national realities...

Police-citizen relations are in the public spotlight following outbursts of anger and violence. Such clashes often happen as a response to fatal police shootings, racial or ethnic discrimination, or the mishandling of mass protests. But even in such cases, citizens’ assessment of the police differs considerably across social groups. This raises the...

Zusammenfassung Zeichen physischer und sozialer Unordnung im öffentlichen Raum gelten im „Broken Windows“-Ansatz als eine maßgebliche Ursache für Unsicherheitsgefühle und den dadurch verstärkten Niedergang großstädtischer Wohngebiete. Die empirische Bestätigung für diese These ist jedoch schwach, da viele Studien auf subjektiven Wahrnehmungen basie...

The goal of the chapter is to study the role of large groups and superordinate group belonging on the level of trust in police, in comparative manner. Their importance is assessed in the context of large cities in France and Germany on a large sample of adolescents by testing theoretical hypotheses on the relationship between ethnicity, religion an...

Objectives: The aim of this study is to investigate potential differences between homicide-suicide cases in which the perpetrator does or does not write a suicide note. As homicide-suicides are complex types of lethal violence for which the aggressor cannot be held accountable, suicide notes may be a valuable source of information about the backgr...

Steigende Unsicherheitswahrnehmungen im höheren Alter korrespondieren kaum mit der objektiven Kriminalitätsrate oder dem Risiko, Opfer einer Straftat zu werden. Vielmehr beeinflussen das Gefühl der eigenen Verletzbarkeit, die Wahrnehmungen im Wohnquartier und die Beziehungen zur Nachbarschaft das subjektive Sicherheitsempfinden Älterer in besondere...

Bevölkerungsbefragungen zu Erlebnissen als Opfer von Straftaten und kriminalitätsbezogenen Einstellungen erlauben eine Aufhellung des kriminalstatistischen Dunkelfeldes der Kriminalität und ergänzen die Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik um wichtige Informationen zur Kriminalitätsfurcht, dem Anzeigeverhalten und den Strafeinstellungen. Im Rahmen des Ve...

Next to exclusionary and discriminatory practices in other live domains, tense police–adolescent relations and the treatment of ethnic minority adolescents by the police are discussed as the foremost trigger for urban riots across Europe. Discretionary identity checks and ‘stop and search’ practices are particularly contentious. Situated in a count...

Logics of checking Policing differences between France and Germany This paper, which is based on direct observation and interviews of police officers and also on questionnaires administered to the public, compares decisions of French and German police officers regarding identity checks and puts them in the context of the respective styles of polic...

By analysing French and German police stop and search on the streets based on embedded observations in police patrols and findings of a large school survey, this article comparatively questions their determinants. Control practices diverge in their frequency: the German police officers control less proactively than their French counterparts. The ta...

Kriminalstatistiken gehören zu den ältesten kontinuierlich erhobenen Sozialindikatoren. Ihre Geschichte reicht bis ins frühe 19. Jahrhundert zurück, als die Justizbehörden eini- ger deutscher Länder nach französischem und englischem Vorbild begannen, Kriminal- statistiken zu führen und zu veröffentlichen (Heinz 1990). Für die Moralstatistiker des 1...

This paper, which is based on direct observation and interviews of police officers, and also on questionnaires administered to the public, compares decisions of French and German police officers regarding identity checks and puts them in the context of the respective styles of policing. Even though the objectives are similar (fighting crime, assert...

One of the key observations of delinquency research - that adolescents are more likely to offend during the time spent in the company of peers and without adult supervision - has been supported by recent studies following the Situational Action Theory (SAT) framework. According to SAT, spending time with delinquent friends may influence adolescent...

Das Vertrauen in andere Mitmenschen und die Furcht, das Opfer einer Straftat zu werden, stehen in einer engen reziproken Beziehung. Die bisherige Forschung hat bereits einen Zusammenhang zwischen lokaler Unordnung, Vertrauen und Kriminalitätsfurcht festgestellt. Diese haben wiederum Auswirkungen auf die Teilhabe am öffentlichen Leben und die Intera...

Wie häufig werden Bürgerinnen und Bürger in Deutschland Opfer von Diebstahl, Raub, Körperverletzung und anderen Delikten, wie sicher fühlen sie sich, und wie zufrieden sind sie mit der Arbeit der Polizei? Diese und weitere Fragen werden in diesem Arbeitsbericht von einem gemeinsamen Autorenteam des Bundeskriminalamtes und des Max-Planck-Instituts f...

In der empirischen Erforschung der Ursachen von Delinquenz setzt sich zunehmend die Auffassung durch, dass unterschiedliche Einflussfaktoren nicht additiv, sondern multiplikativ auf die Neigung zu abweichendem Verhalten wirken. Dadurch wird der Allgemeingültigkeitsanspruch von Theorieansätzen, nach denen es nur eine maßgebliche Ursache von Delinque...

The article discusses the question of how German criminal courts interpret the phenomenon of honour killings. Based on analyses of criminal case records, it examines whether and to what extent district courts follow the jurisprudence of the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) by convicting the perpetrators of murder for base motives...

POLIS is an acronym for “Police and Adolescents in Multiethnic Societies” and the title of a French-German research project run by the CNRS, PACTE research unit of Science-Po - University of Grenoble, and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg. What makes this project distinct from previous comparative studi...

1. Einleitung Auch wenn der Cyberspace eine zunehmende Bedeutung fur bekannte und neuartige Formen der Kriminalitat erlangt, bleiben viele herkommliche Formen strafbaren Verhaltens – z. B. Sachbeschadigung, Diebstahl, Wohnungseinbruch, Raub, Korperverletzung – doch fest in Raum und Zeit verankert. Erhebliche Teile des Phanomens Kriminalitat werden...

Einige spektakuläre Mordfälle an jungen migrantischen Frauen haben das Thema "Ehrenmorde" seit kurzem in das öffentliche Bewusstsein in Deutschland (und anderen westeuropäischen Ländern) gerückt und Besorgnisse über die Lebenssituation von Frauen in muslimischen Einwanderergruppen verstärkt. Hatan Sürücü und Morsal Obeidi, die 2005 in Berlin bzw. 2...

In recent literature State action strategies and collective sensibilities condense to complex regimes of dealing with deviance and marginality. Thereby, national practices of handling social difference combine with public sentiments and mentalities to form coherent cultures of social control. In this article we investigate whether homogeneous cultu...

Die Spannbreite der Erfahrungen und Perspektiven, die sich mit den Begriffen Kriminalität und Delinquenz verbinden, ist enorm. Bankraub gehört ebenso zu dazu wie Insidertrading, körperliche Züchtigung der eigenen Kinder gleichermaßen wie Partnertötung, Ladendiebstahl ebenso wie Anlagebetrug, Schuleschwänzen, Schutzgelderpressung und Haschischkonsum...

Why do certain people commit acts of crime? Why does crime happen in certain places? Presenting an ambitious new study designed to test a pioneering new theory of the causes of crime, Breaking Rules: The Social and Situational Dynamics of Young People's Urban Crime demonstrates that these questions can only go so far in explaining why crime happens...

A small fraction of all homicides are followed by the immediate suicide of the perpetrator (HS hereafter), sometimes including multiple victims. The co-occurrence of two divergent forms of lethal violence, one directed against other persons, one against the self, has puzzled scholars for a long time, since there is a tradition to regard homicide an...

This article assesses the association between national welfare state regimes and public insecurities about crime across Europe. A multilevel analysis of respondents in 23 countries sampled in the 2004/05 European Social Survey finds a strong relationship between insecurities about crime and national levels of social expenditure and decommodificatio...

This paper examines differences in the crime load in the German region of Baden-Wuerttemberg on the low spatial level of municipalities (N = 1.109). Using multivariate regression models, the effects of social and economic conditions on violent and property crimes are analyzed and referenced to the theoretical approaches of social disorganization an...

This study examines whether having delinquent friends interacts with other peer-related variables in the explanation of adolescent offending. We hypothesise that the relationship between delinquent friends and offending might be conditioned by the effect of (1) how much time they spend with their friends, (2) how much time they spend in unstructure...

This study draws upon data from the European Social Survey to examine Messner und Rosenfeld's Institutional Anomie Theory. Institutional Anomie Theory tries to explain cross-national differences in crime rates by the interaction of society's cultural and institutional forces. The relevant state of research is unsatisfactory and full of gaps. Defici...

Zu den Dimensionen, die in der Forschung über Jugenddelinquenz seit einigen Jahren wieder intensiver beachtet werden, zählen auch sozialräumliche Kontexte. Für Kinder und Jugendliche stellen das Stadtviertel, in dem sie wohnen, und die Schule, in die sie gehen, bedeutsame Sozialisationskontexte dar, die sie mit Ressourcen und Gelegenheiten für Erfa...

Das Begriffspaar „Kriminalität und Ungleichheit“ bildet einen klassischen Zugang zu der soziologischen Analyse von Verbrechen und Strafe mit einer sehr langen Geschichte und andauernden Brisanz (Hagan/Peterson 1995; Karstedt 1996; Ludwig-Mayerhofer 2000; Scherr 2010). Eine wichtige Dimension dieser Verbindung betrifft die Annahme, dass Tatverdächti...

Since 1978, the Chinese reform policy has brought fast economic developments and social change but also considerably higher crime levels. China’s rapid modernization has resulted in a situation of increased opportunities and Durkheimian anomie. The Chinese government responds to the worsening crime situation with punitive criminal sanctions, especi...

In this chapter we argue, both from a theoretical (Situational Action Theory) and methodological(homogeneity of environmental conditions) point of view, that smallenvironmental units are preferable to large in the study of environmentaleffects on crime. Most empirical research in the field of communities and crimeutilizes fairly large spatial units...

Kriminalität gehört zur Normalität von Gesellschaften. Schon der Soziologe Emile Durkheim (1984 [1895]) erkannte, dass die Existenz von sozialen Normen notwendig auch die Abweichung von diesen Normen beinhaltet, und dass daher eine „störungsfreie“ soziale Ordnung nicht denkbar ist; selbst nicht in einem Kloster, da hier andere und strengere Verhalt...

In this paper, we test hypotheses about the spatial variation in rates of robbery in West and East European cities (Cologne, Germany and Tallinn, Estonia). This comparison represents an interesting case study because Tallinn is an example of former socialist cities which have undergone a period of profound political and socio-economic change since...

In der Forschung zu den räumlichen Dimensionen sozialer Probleme hat sich im letzten Jahrzehnt eine bemerkenswerte Interessenverlagerung von den Entstehungskontexten sozialer Probleme hin zu den Wahrnehmungen sozialer Probleme und insbesondere zu den Wahrnehmungen von (Un)Sicherheit vollzogen. Teilweise folgt dieser Forschungstrend einem gleichgeri...

This paper investigates how adolescents react to living in urban areas of concentrated poverty, and whether contextual effects on psychological strain and delinquent behaviour exist, using a cross-sectional youth survey in 61 neighbourhoods in two German cities and a rural area (n = ca. 5300). Multi-level analysis is applied to estimate neighbourho...

The article pertains to applications of the concept "social capital" in interdisciplinary urban research. We first examine the theoretical approaches and their methodological problems, defining social capital as a collective attribute of the social organization of neighbourhoods. In the second part we review the empirical evidence of the impact of...

This paper, in a first part, reviews current literature on the effects of ethnic and social segregation on children and adolescents. In a second part, it reports results of an empirical study on this issue conducted by the author in two German cities. In recent research, the effects of segregation have been framed as possible ‘contextual effects’ o...

The article reports trends in crime and criminal justice and reviews publications in key areas of criminology in Germany. Criminal statistics show divergent trends in recent years, with rising drug and violent offences and stable or falling property offences. Statistics on sanction practices show a long-term trend towards informal and community san...

Survey-based studies on the prevalence and causes of deviant behaviour very much depend on the honesty of respondents. However, the validity of self-reports is rarely investigated. We report on a external validation of self-reported delinquency of male juveniles based on two survey samples — face-to-face interviews in households (N=309), and paper...

In der Polizeilichen Kriminalstatistik steigen die Belastungsziffern von Kindern und Jugendlichen, insbesondere bei Gewaltdelikten, seit vielen Jahren an. Es ist jedoch umstritten und mangels regelmäßiger Täter- und Opferbefragungen schwer zu entscheiden, ob dies eher auf ein verändertes Gewaltverhalten oder eher auf ein verändertes Anzeige- und Re...

The extent and nature of contextual effects on juvenile offending are frequent subjects of current research, mainly in the USA. After a short literature review, this paper presents empirical results of a new study which hints at the existence of neighbourhood contextual effects on serious offending by adolescents. The study is based on three types...