Code of the Street
Definition
Elijah Anderson's term for an informal set of rules governing public behaviour in disadvantaged urban areas. The code centres on the display of toughness and willingness to use violence to earn respect and deter predation in environments where police protection is perceived as unreliable.
- Originator
- Elijah Anderson
- Field
- Subcultural criminology
- Core mechanism
- Toughness display deters predation where police protection is unreliable
Common questions
How does the code of the street differ from earlier subcultural theories like Cohen's status frustration?+
Anderson grounded the code in ethnographic observation of specific disadvantaged neighbourhoods and tied it directly to a perceived absence of reliable police protection, rather than treating it as a general reaction to blocked opportunity across an entire social class.
Why is the code of the street relevant to investigating urban violence?+
It offers investigators and analysts a behavioural explanation for retaliatory violence and reluctance to cooperate with police in some communities, both of which shape witness availability and the pattern of violent incidents an investigator will encounter.
Related terms
- Differential Opportunity
- Cloward and Ohlin's extension of Merton's strain theory: the type of criminal adaptation that people choose depends not only on blocked legitimate...
- Honour Culture
- A cultural context in which personal reputation for toughness or willingness to defend oneself against insults is essential to social standing. Researchers...
- Reaction Formation
- A concept Cohen borrowed from psychology to describe the process by which delinquent subcultures do not merely abandon middle-class values but actively...
- Status Frustration
- Cohen's term for the psychological tension experienced by working-class boys who are measured against middle-class standards in school and find themselves repeatedly...
- Subculture
- A group within a larger society that shares a distinctive set of values, norms, symbols, and practices. In criminology, the term usually...