The research began by locating the conflicts over teenage misbehavior that occurred across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how the intensity of adult response varied according to people's relationship to place. The research then focused on the kinds of discourse that such misbehavior prompted and how this discourse often slipped away from the locality as such and spoke to the condition and the decline of the national community. Next, the study considered some of the responses people make to adolescent misbehavior in their immediate neighborhoods. The analysis connected people's crime talk to their sense of place and revealed a contradiction between the obligations that people acknowledge to troublesome local youth and their more punitive, exclusionary utterances about youth in general. Findings provided some support to the often-repeated criminological claim that people respond in more modulated and complex ways to events and issues in which they are personally implicated than to those of which they are more abstractly aware. Figure, table, footnotes, and 38 references (Author abstract modified)