Délinquance, criminalité et sentiment d’insécurité

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the increase of different kinds of delinquency in Mexico City during the last decades and the growing feeling of insecurity among the population. These two questions are examined assuming a mutual dependence between them. Our statistical and socio-spatial analysis of this delinquency together with an anthropological view of these problems leads us to a critical appraisal of the dominant rhetoric on the question, a rhetoric that contributes, in the measure that mass-media repeat it, to the spread of an exaggerated feeling of insecurity among large parts of the population.