1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias In the sociology of crime, the term collective efficacy refers to the ability of members of a community to control the behavior of individuals and groups in the community.
Advocates of collective efficacy claim that these measures increase community control over individuals, thus creating an environment where violent crime is less likely to occur.
In urban areas where neighbors monitor group behavior and are willing to intervene to break out fights or otherwise prevent disorder, violent crime is less likely to occur.
[6] Collective efficacy includes behaviors, norms and actions that residents of a given community use to achieve public order (sociologists refer to these as “informal mechanisms”).
[1] In communities where residents are less active in enforcing order, groups of peers and associates who gather in public places are more likely to use violent means to solve disputes.
[3] According to the author of the study, these results can be explained by the finding that communities with high levels of trust, cooperation, and supervision are more likely to offer women several types of assistance, including support, advice, shelter, and social pressure on batterers to desist.
[8] The 2002 study, however, also found that the association between collective efficacy and lower levels of crime against women is stronger in communities where violence between intimate partners is commonly seen as negative.
Since developing mutual trust and cooperation with neighbors requires time, those communities where individuals are more likely to move out have lower levels of collective efficacy.
According to broken windows theory, when residents and authorities do not work to prevent small crimes, a sense of disorder develops in the community.
Evidence shows that disorder depends on the proportion of economically and socially disadvantaged people living in the community, as well as the level of trust and solidarity between neighbors.
These results suggest that the monitoring of public spaces and the willingness of neighbors to intervene to prevent violence reduce crime, even when we take into account how teenagers use their time.
This means that trust and solidarity are likely to lead people to cooperate in order to protect individuals who engage in culturally accepted forms of crime.
According to this "social cohesion" view, relationships between people can make crime more likely, which is the opposite argument to that made by proponents of collective efficacy theory.