STREET CRIME IN NOVI SAD, THEN AND NOW – FROM UTOPIA TO REALITY

Abstract

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of street crime and its social perception in the area of Novi Sad since the end of the Second World War, to this day. Author created and examined three hypotheses, in order to observe these factors: objective presence of crime and the level of crime rate; the organization of criminal phenomena; subjective feelings of citizens regarding their security concerning the entirety of street crime. It was confirmed that the number of the most serious crimes in the domain of street crime is increasing, as well as the number of those that primarily fall under the category of crimes against property. At the same time, it has been pointed out to factors (related to radical transformations of crime, but also to the changes of the entire social environment) which must be taken into account when making such conclusions. It was also accepted that the organization of criminal activities (with a particular emphasis on the phenomenon of organized crime) has undergone a great deal of expansion and progression over time. On the other hand, speaking of the totality of crimes whose primary feature is the use of violence in the broadest sense, it was concluded that there are no valid indicators that point to a categorical conclusion that the real (not only officially registered) number of such crimes is heavily increasing. Analysis of the youth violence and hooliganism in the streets of Novi Sad in the period 1945-1990. showed that this phenomenon was even then broadly widespread and popular, which stands in conflict with (in publicly-often-emphasized) idealized attitudes that negate the mentioned phenomenon, or diminish its influence. Its forms of manifestation have been transformed and modified over the years, but the essential feature - the objective existence of street violence and the constant danger of victimization associated with it - remain unchanged. It is even possible to assume with good reason that certain modalities of aforementioned street violence and hooliganism (first of all, those related to the grouping and identification of the perpetrators relative to a certain part of the city they inhabit, as well as those related to subcultural affiliation and conflicts among different subcultural groups) were much more represented in the past decades than they are today. All this greatly relativizes and calls into question the widely popular claims about the allegedly very high degree of subjective feeling of security and objective security of citizens in the streets of Novi Sad in the period before 1990.