Investigating the Relationship Between Development Indicators and Social Anomalies (Crime and Theft) in Lorestan Province

The distribution of crimes is not accidental at the spatial level; it is always in relation with geographical conditions and requirements. Spatial characteristics such as the level of socioeconomic development have always been considered as one of the determining factors in the amount of crime occurrence. As a developing country, the levels of socio-economic development as well as the rate of crime in Iran are different. Lorestan province is one of the territories in the country, where the inequality of the level of development and the extent of robbery in its counties is evident and very different. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between socio-economic development indicators and the rate of crime across the counties of Lorestan provinces. The research method is descriptive-analyt. Secondary data was used and then analyzed with structural equations and partial least squares (PLS-SEM) approach. The results of the research show that the variables of the research can explain 0.70 of the changes of the dependent variable. The greatest effect on the crimes is related to the economic development status variable. The dimensions of economic development are inversely related to theft, which means that as economic development increases, the amount of crime (theft) decreases. At the next level, the dimensions of socio-cultural development also have an inverse relationship with crime