Crime and the Culture of Incivility

From field notes on city life: A woman is seriously injured by a mugger who follows her to an apartment door and snatches her purse. A couple out for an evening returns to find the apartment burglarized. A 13-year-old car, bearing all the scars of its advanced age and already stolen and recovered four times, is stolen once again. All three incidents occur in a predominantly stable working-class and lower middle-class neighborhood of apartment buildings and two- and three-family houses.