Abstract
The move to gated communities has been linked to both rising affluence and anxiety. These attempts to withdraw from the perceived dangers of urban areas are also predicated on the pursuit of a neighbourhood ideal, and freedom from danger is usually central to this ideal. This paper critically reconsiders these propositions by examining news reports and media narratives surrounding the nature of homicidal violence occurring within such developments. We have analysed fifty news reports from the last decade that address murder committed inside gated communities. In our analysis of these reports we suggest that attempts to neutralise danger in high crime societies are by no means guaranteed—even via the most strenuous efforts at deploying walls, gates and guards. Building on the arguments of Low (2003) and Zedner (2003), we suggest that demands for security are not only unending but that an outward-facing orientation that positions risk outside gated neighbourhoods is a denial of the continued danger of intimate and other forms of violence within communities and households behind gates. In this context the move to enclosure is more than a pragmatic attempt to defend against threat; it appears to reflect the impotence of efforts associated with addressing deep ontological insecurities. Studies continue to record high levels of fear in gated developments, and highly gendered risks of violence continue to be a part of the social reality of the segregated neighbourhood.
Introduction
Exclusive and protected residential space has become a marked feature of the urban landscape (Atkinson and Blandy, 2006; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Marcuse and Van Kempen, 2002). Gated communities address the fear of their residents as well as their desire for prestige and affiliation with other risk-reducing social subjects (Low, 2003). Aside from the fact that in many US localities a large part of new-build housing is gated in nature, the choice to move to such locations is driven by a barely tacit recognition that the risk of victimisation can be strategically reduced through residential location choices, urban design and spatial separation that allow a kind of socio-spatial break to be placed between those ‘other’ locations seen to contain risky social actors. Our brief and exploratory article engages with these debates about fear, social inequality and risk from violent harm by examining news reports of homicidal violence within the fortress archipelago of gated communities in the US.
Both criminology and urban studies have paid little attention to the nature and content of crime and risk within the kind of gated residential development increasingly part of the physical structure of the metropolitan landscape of North America. Yet with around 6 percent of households now behind residential bars (Sanchez, Lang and Dhavale, 2005) this form of development clearly highlights an important response to issues of social difference, inequality and urban danger. With regard to questions of social control, gated communities also raise new questions about self-regulation and secession from formal policing. These new layers of security and self-government, in the form of resident associations, also highlight the difficulty of researching such locations and the increasing sense that a self-regulating moral order lies outside the range and purview of the state and formal methods of policing and, indeed, social investigation.
The rise of gated communities presents a range of conundrums to a critical project within criminology concerned with social risk, inequality and the locus of harm. While the core driver for such development has been the tripartite forces of fear of crime, social distinction and privacy (Blakely and Snyder, 1997) we can also expect that physical shields and an outward orientation to risk may not be effectively trained upon the kinds of harm found within affluent communities; residents in such protected neighbourhoods will tend to focus on risks outside such spaces. This misguided orientation, we contend, is amplified and misdirected by narratives around crime and harm within the media and by property developers who locate the risk of violence, in particular, upon poorer and socially marginal communities (Altheide, 2002).
From a macroscopic viewpoint, nation-states such as the US appear emblematic of a kind of evil paradise (Davis and Monk, 2007) in which market excess, social violence, go-getting corporate values and the combination of social inequality and exclusion generate league-topping rates of violent assault and murder (Currie, 2009) while allowing elites to shelter from the social outfall of their policy regimes (Atkinson, 2008). In this context violence and homicide present dangers primarily within poor and excluded communities. Empirical research on the social geography and causes of homicide shows that they are more often located in the nation’s larger southern cities, and in areas of more concentrated black populations (Blau and Blau, 1982; Currie, 2009). This general picture also needs to be supplemented by an understanding of the way that violence is signalled and conveyed by media systems; impressions of the locus and roots of violence are built up through cumulative and underlying media narratives (Altheide, 2002) that generate a communal focus on racialised otherness, inner cities and urban life shaped by established ‘codes of the street’ that celebrate unfailing aggression (Anderson, 2000). If American society has essentially failed (Currie, 2009) to protect social vulnerability (though clearly it is by no means alone in this) while generating an archipelago of risky urban spaces, it has also produced another, counterpart city of gilded and girded neighbourhoods that provide a place of home for the affluent and middle-income groups seeking to exit environments generating such risks (Low, 2003).
Gated developments protected by walls and gates and governed by contractually binding codes of conduct that stress neighbour non-interference (Atkinson and Blandy, 2006; Low, 2003) now exist across most localities in the US. Since the core rationale reported by many residents, and the taglines of developers and realtors, relate to an escape from an untamed urban core to a place of social likeness and safety, it seems relevant that such spaces be engaged in debates about crime and harm. While there are certain kinds of neighbourhoods and urban centres that see much higher rates of violent risk (Dunlap, Golub, Johnson and Wesley, 2002), attention has rarely been paid to affluent neighbourhoods or their cultural location in relation to questions of crime and its representation. Media narratives and developer sales pitches about the sanctity of high-income neighbourhood life appear to force the closure of social imaginations to the possibility of violence to, or within, affluent communities.
Our work takes homicide as a partial index of violent risk more broadly within affluent communities, tackling this through its reportage in the US print media. Focusing on gated communities we ask two questions. First, what indication does such reporting give of the extent and nature of murder within ghettos of concentrated affluence? Second, what does the media portrayal of such violence say about common perceptions of the geographical locus and social roots of potential harm more broadly? We begin by providing a brief review of the research literature on crime and violence in gated communities. We follow this with a statement on our approach before presenting our findings.
Homicide, Segregation and Domestic Fortification
A surprisingly small literature has emerged around the question of how protected and gated neighbourhoods generate or deter different kinds of criminal activity. Recent evidence shows that the social composition of such spaces is by no means restricted to the affluent (Plaut, 2011)—the increasing impression generated by recent US research is of an extending and fortified version of suburbia (Vesselinov and Le Goix, 2009). This, at least, suggests that we should use caution in thinking of gated developments as a fully separate form of community life. Indeed, it would now seem that the racial and tenurial diversity of these sites, to say nothing of their significant size in certain individual cases, means that they increasingly appear to be evolving into something more like mini-societies or microcosms of much of the US urban fabric (Plaut, 2011).
For analysts such as Webster (2002), gated communities are club realms that provide subscriber-residents with access to heightened levels of domestic security, while those who cannot or choose not to access these places are left potentially more vulnerable. In increasingly unequal societies the resource-dependant nature of these additional layers of home security has generated searching questions about the links between citizen rights to safety and these new ‘bubbles of security’. Since the presence of gates, walls and guards is intended to prevent non-resident access, and that of burglars and others with ill intent of some kind, routine activity theorists and urban designers would no doubt be quick to argue that while such mechanisms may diminish criminal opportunity they are also likely to displace crime to adjacent, less-well protected zones (for example, see Lemanski, 2006). Evidence for this hypothesis is patchy.
Rational choice theorists have argued that gating and the impression of wealth contained within gated communities may present greater attractions for acquisitive forms of crime. Research here is inconclusive: gating may and may not deter or attract such forms of crime. But what of the question of violence, and, in particular, homicide in spaces that are marketed as safe havens? A study by Wilson-Doenges (2000) looked at sense of community, perceived safety and crime rates in two high-income and two low-income areas in Newport Beach, California. In each income bracket both a gated and non-gated community were selected using census data. Both of the low-income areas were public housing projects. Each pair of neighbourhoods was selected to have similar age, population density, size and housing profiles so that a range of hypotheses could be tested around perceived safety, community safety and actual crime rates. Crime data was collected for each community from the relevant police department including homicide, rape, burglary and car theft.
The results of the survey showed there was no significant difference in perceived safety nor in actual crime rates between the high-income neighbourhoods (gated and non-gated). Between the low-income gated and non-gated communities there was also no difference in crime rates and no significant difference in sense of community and perceived safety. Thus Wilson-Doenges suggested that the idea that residents of gated developments are generating a significant dividend, either in terms of perceptions or real rates of crime, is at odds with the findings of the research. In fact not only do the residents of these gated communities appear to receive no net benefit, in terms of lower crime rates, they also appear to be subject to lower levels of social cohesion (Wilson-Doenges, 2000: 607).
Wilson-Doenges’s work appears to be the most recent, comparative and usable study that considers the relative prevalence of homicides and crime in and outside gated developments. It is important at this stage to note her finding that these rates were similar for affluent and middle-income gated and non-gated areas, respectively. The implication of this finding is worth restating: the risks from which residents of gated developments appear to be hiding are not diminished by purchasing the apparent security of such sites (though this does not mean that they are less exposed than poorer communities per se). The sense that gating might provide an illusory shield against perceived danger is a thread that we pursue in the remainder of our exploratory work presented here.
Returning to the immediate question of homicides in gated and affluent communities, we can see that in 1991 the US homicide rate stood at 9.8 per 100,000 (US Department of Justice data). By 2009 this had shown a steady decrease to 5.0. However, these rates continue to lead the western world and are comparable with those of less stable, socially distressed and unequal developing countries internationally (Currie, 2009). Similarly we see that aggravated assault, a closely related figure in discussions of extreme violence and social risk, declined from a peak of 441.9 per 100,000 in 1992 to 262.8 in 2009 (US Department of Justice). This crime ‘drop’ has led to numerous analyses, but of more interest here is the geography of such problems and the inclusion of affluent, gated developments within such debates. The question of homicide and community social composition and risk has exercised criminologists for many years. In their influential study Blau and Blau (1982) suggested that metropolitan-level data on homicides and inequalities pointed to a positive correlation: gender disparities in wealth generated greater risks for their inhabitants in the form of extreme violence. Yet, as we well know, the social geography of such patterns of danger are not random or evenly distributed; as the Blaus and others have shown, homicide tends to prevail within socially fractured zones.
Methods
Our work sought to consider representations and the substantive issues relating to homicide within gated residential developments, ostensibly designed to prevent crime and access by non-residents. Our work focused on the recording of these events as they appeared in news media reporting to consider the kind of media narratives used to present these events. The research sought to extend general preoccupations with homicide as the clearest criminal infraction of legal codes (particularly in terms of its social geography) while expanding debates about the portrayal of violence and its possible concealment within our cultural life more broadly.
Some important caveats need to be raised at this point. First, an approach using such data cannot tell us about rates of aggravated assault that may indicate murderous intent and extreme harm (Currie, 2009), cases of which would be more extensive. Following D’Cruze, Walklate and Pegg (2006), we take homicide as an indicator of risk and a problem that itself generates public anxiety and dialogue about the nature and locus of the risk of violence. As D’Cruze et al. argue, criminologists have tended to neglect this issue despite public concern. Second, we are able to say little about the comparative geography of violence inside and outside communities of similar affluence, given the nature of the data. We therefore stress the exploratory nature of the research and its attempt to gather data on murders within gated communities.
Why should relatively rare events of this kind be of interest to us? Our underlying position reflects a broadening interest in situational crime prevention, expressed through a spatial retreat of affluence into gated spaces, on the one hand, and a deeper sense of ambient unease driving this flight into domestic space on the other. In this sense our project seeks to connect with deeper elements of fear and place, its effects on residential choice and, not least, the role of media infrastructures and corporate/developer messages about the social spatial loci of risk to the person.
We searched the Lexis-Nexis news media database for news wires dealing with homicide in gated communities over the period 2000–12 using the following search expression: “gated community AND murder OR homicide” for US newswires and papers. This yielded several thousand hits which we then had to sift for relevance and duplication, finally arriving at just over fifty unique recorded incidents of homicide over this period. In general, we presupposed, homicides occurring in gated communities would attract more media attention but that it would nevertheless be difficult to estimate the total volume of homicides from this dataset. We realised we would not be able to extend our analysis to include accounts of aggravated assault and domestic violence and abuse without significantly higher levels of resource and, ideally, the availability of geo-coded data that would permit analysis in relation to gated and non-gated areas. Similarly our analysis does not include a sense of statistical or spatial control to be found in similarly affluent but non-gated spaces.
News Reports of Homicides in US Gated Communities
To begin we developed a discriminating typology of murders within gated communities. Through our analysis of sometimes several separate media reports we were generally able to identify a number of commonalities and distinctions around the locations of the murders and the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator of the crime in each instance. The 54 cases were analysed, and four mutually exclusive forms of homicide within gated communities were ultimately identified. We organised these through a comprehensive analysis of thematic context and variables such as offender and victim age, gender, financial situation, weapon used, motivation and the nature of relationship between the perpetrator and the victims. The first type involves intimate partners or family members, the second involves neighbours or members of the same community, while the latter involves acquaintances or service providers with a legitimate reason to be in the gated community, and strangers with no legitimate reason to be behind the gates (three cases feature in more than one category due to the complex nature of these incidents)—grouped into the following categories:
Intimate/Domestic homicide (n = 31)
Community homicide (n = 5)
‘Breach’ homicide: (i) entry by someone known to resident/worker in the community (n = 13); (ii) entry by unknown aggressor (n = 8).
Intimate Homicide
The most frequent type of murder within gated communities we found tended to fall into the category of intimate lethal violence. These are murders that involve family members or intimate partners as either perpetrators or victims, and take place within the household. In its most direct form this would constitute a spousal or familial homicide. These events are undoubtedly gendered, with 72 percent of these cases committed by male perpetrators. In 61 percent of these cases, the victim was a female intimate partner of the perpetrator.
Where the cases of intimate homicide could be characterised as involving a current or former sexual partner, the triggering point for the violence tended to be the breakdown or threatened breakdown of the relationship, conforming to the broader literature on domestic abuse which suggests that women are most vulnerable and most likely to become victims of homicide when they have left or are trying to leave an intimate relationship (see for example Allen, 1983). In a number of these reports, friends and neighbours express surprise at the event. This differs from studies into similar crimes outside gated communities (Easteal, 1994; Wilson and Daly, 1993). These studies suggest that friends, neighbours and witnesses are often able to indicate a historical account of relationships beset by violence, arguments and household chaos.
It is worth exploring the possibility that some of this difference is accounted for by higher levels of privacy that exist within gated communities. In one of our cases, the ex-boyfriend of the intended target instead ended up killing two other men, one of whom was the security guard on post at the gate, before killing himself. This example highlights the potential porosity of security measures—not only can a determined assailant access the community, but it is possible to argue that the apparent safety and security is negated by the fact that one cannot legislate for the personal circumstances of neighbours, a point we return to below.
A total of 11 of the 31 cases of intimate murder involved the death of children. In only one of these cases was the child over the age of 10, and the perpetrators were male in six cases, and father to the children in five of those cases. In none of the cases examined did the female-instigated filicide result in the death of anyone other than the children, whereas fathers involved in a similar crime were much more likely to kill their spouse as well as their children, and in a number of cases also commit suicide. In each of the cases in which the filicide was perpetrated by a female, drugs, alcohol and mental illness were suggested as causal factors, and evidence of premeditation was present in the majority of cases.
Our data contains the example of a mother who shot her teenage children in a Florida gated community. The murder was premeditated, as the perpetrator wrote notes both before and after the event, as well as purchasing a gun for the sole purpose of the shooting. Our previous point about the additional privacy conferred by gated communities is lent support by the testimony of neighbours who were quoted as saying ‘they seemed like a nice family. I never thought this would happen’. 1 The perpetrator appears to have had a history of depression and drug and alcohol dependency, a recurrent characteristic within our dataset for female-led filicide, and one that is noted in the wider literature (Harper and Voigt, 2007).
Murder-suicide accounts for 15 of the cases within our data, with seven able to be categorised as family annihilation, with the perpetrator killing their partner, children and then themselves. In all of the family annihilation cases, the perpetrator was male, and in three of the cases, financial difficulties were cited as a causal factor, while relationship breakdown seemed to account for a further two, and the cause was stated as unknown in two cases.
The incidence of family annihilation with financial stress as a causal factor is perhaps best illustrated in the case of a Los Angeles-based financial manager who, in a premeditated move, bought a gun, wrote two suicide notes and a last will and testament before killing his wife, mother-in-law, three sons, and then himself. Described in the media as a ‘perfect American family’, 2 he lost his fortune on the stock exchange in 2008, a factor raised in his suicide note. Dietz (1986) suggests that ‘family annihilators’ typically assume that no-one in the family can care for themselves. In the case stated here, the perpetrator stated in his note that he was faced with the decision of killing himself or himself and his family. Such cases are redolent of Durkheim’s (1897/1951) concept of fatalistic suicide, or Agnew’s (2004) notion of stress-strain, where issues of relative deprivation compounded with additional stressors caused by relationship difficulties or changes in relative wealth build into an insurmountable pressure of personal failure. It seems possible that within a pristine and status-pressured gated community, the undertow of competition, individualism and atomisation might provide an additional strain.
Community Homicide
Community homicide is the term we apply to those murders taking place within gated communities carried out by other residents of the gated community. Community homicide accounted for five cases in our dataset. For example, a retired schoolteacher who lived in a gated community on Long Island was murdered by a 32-year-old who lived in the same community, but was not known to the victim. According to news reports, the perpetrator was burgling the house when interrupted by the victim. Such incidents tend not to be premeditated and result as a dispute escalates, or if an acquisitive crime, such as burglary, is interrupted. A further example is provided by the case of a 61-year-old male who shot his female neighbour as a long-running boundary dispute escalated into physical violence.
Breach
The third type of homicide that we have identified as extant within gated communities is that of breach murder. This category can be further divided into two subcategories—linked and unknown. The title of the subdivision relates to the relationship of the perpetrator to the victim and gated community. While breaches by unknown aggressors can be imagined as the foundation of fear and a false sense of community within the gated community (see Wilson-Doenges, 2000), with the perpetrator fulfilling the role of the feared ‘other’, linked breaching suggests a relationship with the gated community. This consists either of a legitimate reason to be there, or having knowledge that assists them in gaining access to the gated community, despite not residing in the development itself. Murder of this type accounted for 13 cases, a quarter of the total news-reported homicides that we uncovered. In the case of the 50-year-old woman, killed with her son and his friend, the assailants were acquaintances of the son, and were aware that the family had money and two new cars, which were the intended target. They were able to access the gated community by deception at the gate intercom, since they did not have access to the gate code. Similar cases within this category involve perpetrators accessing gated properties through giving details of people they know in order to circumnavigate the security system. In another case, we found an example in which a five-year-old girl was abducted and killed by a man who was familiar with the gated community. Having previously dated a woman who lived in the same condominium complex, the perpetrator had been tried and acquitted of molesting the daughter and niece of his ex-partner. He undoubtedly had a working knowledge of the area, including the playground within the grounds of the complex from which the victim was taken. According to newspaper reports, the family had moved to the area as they believed it would provide a safe area for their three children, and enable the children to play outside ‘without fear’. 3
One of our cases highlighted the lack of control that residents exercise over who is responsible for maintenance and repair as well as the provision of essential services within the gated community, and the potential this has for erupting upon the regimented order. This is exemplified by the construction worker working inside an upscale gated community of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, who, following a dispute over picking up some workplace debris, shot work colleagues in July 2001. Although a rare event, the case serves as a reminder that all gated communities cannot be secured absolutely against the violence of the outside world—in many cases outsiders regularly work or support the service needs of residents and this often generates anxieties for residents (Maher, 2003).
Our second category, breaches by unknown assailants, perhaps best represents the kind of archetypal fear from which residents of gated communities might be supposed to be relatively immune. Such homicides involve a perpetrator unconnected to the victim, who is neither a resident nor affiliated to a resident of the gated community. This harm is not limited to murder, but murder may result as the unforeseen consequence of other criminal activity that has brought them to the gated community, such as burglary or theft. Our searches uncovered eight instances of the perpetrator being an unknown outsider, one-sixth of our documented cases. In a number of these cases, the murder was precipitated by the potential lucrative target of the gated community.
Unknown breaches are exemplified by the May 2000 murder of a 22-year-old female student, who lived in a gated community in Gainsville, Florida. 4 Despite the apartment block in which she lived having secure entry, the perimeter fence was insecure, allowing a well-trodden short-cut to the rear, leading to another apartment block, in which the perpetrator lived. The victim’s car as well other items were stolen, with newspaper reports indicating that the murder was an opportunistic burglary that escalated to murder and sexual assault once he was disturbed by the victim. This case suggests the failure of the levels of security promised by the gated apartment complex, a factor that generated a desire for retribution on the part of the victim’s family, who planned to sue the apartment block owners for their negligence in failing to provide security and safety. The data suggests that the victim frequently left windows open and unsecured, despite the fact that her apartment was on the ground floor, and despite warnings from friends. In these cases we can conceive of the breach as not only a physical disruption but also a breakdown of residents’ trust in the capacity of the defences of the development to confer absolute safety from external threat. It is also worth considering that the failure of the gated development to deliver on its promise to guarantee the safety of residents might in fact prompt a renewed search for a development that provides yet greater levels of security and social segregation.
The belief in the ability of gated communities to provide an absolute level of safety and security is certainly unfounded, despite the confident assertions found in the marketing materials for such communities. However, we can assume that tenders for maintenance in communal areas and private security are likely to be won by the lowest bidder, which may result in security guards, who are most likely earning minimum wage and are alienated from the lifestyles of those they are being paid to protect, becoming complacent, inattentive or open to corruption.
Conclusion
Much of the focus on homicide has been on deprived neighbourhoods because of its concentration in such localities. The question of social inequality leads us to consider that what happens within affluent communities is also important, for a number of reasons. First, the location of such communities may be predicated upon a desire to escape social risks and violence, risks that have been argued to be deeply implicated in the social roots of extreme violence in US culture more broadly. Yet what also leads us to delve into these issues is the possibility that this escape may be at least partially blocked by the continued exposure of the affluent to similar levels of crime, despite living in gated communities. Acknowledging the difficulty of locating accurate data, we have used a proxy source, US news wires, to identify the features and nature of reporting about homicides as an indicator of the kind of issues that present in such spaces.
In concluding we would suggest that work on spaces deemed to be largely crime-free, protected micro-utopias presents us with intriguing and important questions about how crime is represented and plays out within broader debates about risk. If risks of criminal violence, stemming from within and outside gated neighbourhoods, is similar to that in other affluent areas then it is possible to argue that the cultural tropes of fortification and fear require deeper interrogation—who can be fully safe in an unequal, discriminating and segregated society?
It may seem that American society, via a range of routes, has generated a crime problem that at least partially drives the need for the affluent to seek a form of social exit to protected neighbourhoods, wherever these options are available. Yet in moving from suburban communities, themselves designed to act as a firewall against the risk of danger and otherness, this exit is ultimately blocked by the possibility that gated communities are no better at offering protection than suburbs from the risk of violence both outside and inside such communities and households.
The horror attached to media reports of homicide in apparently ‘respectable’ and affluent gated developments modulates in relation to the type of murder enacted. Nevertheless it would also seem that this shock is further fuelled by the realisation that no spaces can be constructed that are fully secure within a society characterised by growing social injustice, inequality and the social and physical fracturing of its urban communities more generally. This is likely a conclusion that goes ‘beyond’ our data at this point but, nevertheless, the deep chord struck by homicides in affluent communities is clearly not simply about the sense that such events ‘should not happen’ in such apparently benign contexts—they may yet force the questioning of a social and economic structure that generates forms of violence from which there can be no effective flight.
The cases we have highlighted, described here as breach homicides, show that a search to minimise potential contact with aggressors, generated by inequality, humiliation and subcultures that script violent conduct, risky others in socially stressed contexts, cannot in fact fully rule out such harm. More problematic, however, is the continued existence of intimate homicide which is both highly gendered and takes place within the ordinary flow of social life in these concealed neighbourhoods. Our data permits a limited insight into the kind of homicides that occur in gated developments and how these are reported. However, it does little to illuminate the question of domestic and gendered forms of abuse and violence and the prevalence of aggravated assault, for which data is much more difficult to generate. If the dream of a gated community is in large part its offering of community safety, then the emergence of such housing markets, based on security, is in many ways an economy predicated on a falsehood—the impossibility of total security of the domestic home.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.