Visual cues based on the geography of a place also influence the perception of how serious crime is or is not in a neighborhood. Using Chicago as a model, Park and Burgess discovered that criminal activity was associated with what they called transition zones located around the city center (Winterdyk 2000, p.). During his speech, he highlighted that most of the figures and statistics that report on disparities in the criminal justice system are carried out in urban areas, ignoring disparities in rural areas. Therefore, these commissions may be responsible for providing the funding and organizing the analysis of the data so that we have a complete database with all the information we can obtain about the people and communities from which they come, and then make sure to identify any disparity for any group, whether by race, ethnicity or gender, but also reducing it by sexual identity, veteran status and all the groups that we believe the criminal justice system may or may not treat differently.
The study of the social characteristics of offenders and victims can be extended to a critical examination of the role of place in influencing criminal activity. Another broad theoretical tradition, which addresses some of the criticisms of the ecological approach, is the concept of criminal opportunity. Criminology research reveals that certain social characteristics are related to a greater likelihood of participation in criminal activities. Another criticism is that crime rates in neighborhoods can be influenced to a certain extent by police decision-making, since active enforcement in a particular community creates the perception of higher levels of criminal activity than those that actually exist.
It is assumed that opportunity is the necessary condition for crime and that the increasing number of consumer goods in stores and homes and the sharp increase in personal wealth have provided greater opportunities for criminal activity.
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