Objective Research demonstrates that crime is concentrated. This finding is so consistent that David Weisburd refers to this as the "law of crime concentration at place". However, most research on crime concentration has been conducted in the US or European cities and has used secondary data sources. In this study, we examine whether the law of crime concentration applies in the context of sub-Saharan Africa using primary data. Methods A crime victimization survey was used to collect data in the city of Kaduna (Nigeria). Using these data, the concentration of crime (breaking-and-entering and domestic theft) was examined at the household, street segment, and neighborhood levels. Specifically, variants of a Lorenz curve and the Gini index (GI) were used to examine whether crime concentrates at these different spatial scales and if such concentration reflects anything beyond the spatial distribution of opportunity for these types of offenses. Results Crime was found to concentrate at all spatial scales, and having accounted for expectation, given the distribution of opportunity, crime was most concentrated at the household level, closely followed by street segments. It was relatively less concentrated at the neighborhood level. Conclusion The current study extends previous research in a number of ways. It shows that the law of crime concentration at place applies in a very different context to most previous work. Unlike previous studies, we use primary data collected specifically to test the law, avoiding problems associated with the dark figure of crime. Moreover, the findings persist after accounting for crime opportunity.

Evidence suggests that crimes committed in urban environments are geographically concentrated across a range of scales, and that the variation in rates of crime within an urban space is significantly dependent on the physical environment as well as the situation in which the crime takes place. However, these assertions are typically drawn from environmental criminological studies that have focussed on Euro-American cities and western intellectual perspectives. We seek to move beyond these by focussing on a second-tier city in sub-Saharan Africa (Kaduna, Nigeria), a context for which very little literature exists. This paper therefore examines the association between a range of street characteristics and the risk of residential burglary in Kaduna for the first time. It describes a methodology for conducting a household crime victimisation survey in Nigeria, and then aggregating the information to a street-level to perform a population-based ecological study. It integrates street network analysis and statistical modelling techniques in order to provide novel estimates for factors that may increase the risk of burglary such as street accessibility metrics (e.g. connectivity, betweenness and closeness centrality), segment length, socioeconomic status and business activities. Finally, the article provides a discussion on the plausibility and implication of findings within the sub-Saharan African context.

The formal policing of cities in Nigeria is constitutionally the responsibility of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), through its various commands in all 36 states of the federation. At a time when public confidence in the NPF is arguably at a record low, cities across Nigeria have continued to experience a high increase in rates of crime. Nigeria is a country of about 200 million people but currently has an average of 180 police officers per 100,000 residents, which is among the lowest per capita rates in the world. Even with this grossly undersized police force, a former Inspector General of Police once disclosed that more than a quarter of the NPF officers are posted to what he described as "illegal duties" -assigned to politicians, government officials, and other VIPs as personal guards, as reported in the Guardian newspaper. stopped and searched without reasonable grounds, coupled with incidents of extrajudicial killings, became a subject of a recent nationwide protest that attracted global attention. Celebrities across the globe lent their voice in support of this protest through the popular hashtag #EndSARS, making it the most trending global topic on Twitter on 9 October, 2020. Three days following the start of this protest, the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) announced the disbandment of the SARS unit, and also committed to completely reforming the NPF to a citizen-centered policing institution.Considering that reforms are processes, not events, it is likely that urban communities will continue to seek much of their security needs and justice requirements through non-state mechanisms.

This chapter focuses on the social disorganization approach to understanding variations in area-level rates of crime. It first provides context through a brief description of the study area, Badarawa-Malali, an urban district in the city of Kaduna, Nigeria (Section 17.2). Section 17.3 provides a review of the different components of social disorganization theory, the mechanisms through which they are believed to operate, how they have been estimated in previous studies, and whether they are meaningful in the context of Nigeria. Section 17.4 describes the data and survey methods employed, while Section 17.5 discusses the geographical units of analysis used in this present study. Section 17.6 presents an empirical test of social disorganization theory using data for Nigeria. The final section discusses the findings and their implications for criminological understanding.