Article

Race, Space, and the Spread of Violence Across the City

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Abstract

A central explanation for elevated violence in urban African American neighborhoods is that the relationship can be accounted for by race-related differences in socioeconomic conditions. Yet recent studies have shown that predominantly African American neighborhoods experience higher rates of violence relative to other ethno-racial communities, even when socioeconomic conditions can be held constant. Explanations for these differences center on the deleterious effects of extensive residential segregation and the existing racial order privileging whites and their communities. This study examines whether the concentration and spread of urban violence can be characterized as a racially invariant process over half a century. In a detailed case study of the prototypical “rustbelt” city of Buffalo, New York, between the 1950s and the 1990s, negative binomial regression analyses fail to support the racial invariance thesis for predicting intra-neighborhood homicide rates. Multinomial logit regression models show that racial composition is also associated with vulnerability to inclusion in a cluster of highly violent neighborhoods as homicide diffused across the city, especially in recent decades. Thus, the spatial organization of urban African American neighborhoods generates a unique racialized vulnerability to the extralocal diffusion of violence; there is, in effect, an ecological racial variance in the spread of violence across the city. Moreover, this process has become increasingly entrenched over time, undermining any assertion that the urban experience reflects a post-racial America.

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... Located in Western New York, the city grew substantially and prospered through the mid-1950s due to its strong industrial base and accessibility via railroads and the Erie Canal. Like other shrinking rust-belt cities, such as Cleveland and Detroit, the city underwent significant economic and demographic downturns in the second half of the twentieth century due to the decline in its manufacturing sector and urban deterioration (Griffiths 2013;Silverman et al. 2015). Currently, Buffalo is a mid-sized city with a population of a little more than 250,000 residents. ...
... While the majority of the demographic variables were not statistically significant, this is not surprising, given the short time period (five years) and using fixed effect models. Given that such demographic characteristics tend to be temporally consistent and slowly changing in Buffalo (Griffiths 2013), it is not surprising these effects do not result in statistically significant effects on crime (Worrall 2008). While we expected the inclusion of the residential addresses term to have a positive effect on crime, only in the CAD model did it have a statistically significant effect on crime, and this was negative. ...
Article
Objectives From 2010 through 2015, the city of Buffalo demolished over 2,000 residences. This study examines whether those demolitions resulted in crime reductions. Methods Analysis was conducted at microplaces matching demolished parcels to comparable control parcels with similar levels of crime. In addition, spatial panel regression models were estimated at the census tract and quarterly level, taking into account demographic characteristics of neighborhoods. Results We find that at the microplace level, demolitions cause a steep drop in reported crime at the exact parcel and result in additional crime decreases at buffers of up to 1,000 feet away. At the census tract level, results indicated that demolitions reduced part 1 crimes, but the effect was not statistically significant across different models. Conclusions While concerns over crime and disorder are common for vacant houses, the evidence that housing demolitions are an effective crime reduction solution is only partially supported by the analyses here. Future research should compare demolitions in reference to other neighborhood revitalization processes.
... Evidence suggests that exposure to community violence is not equally distributed among youth or across space (Peterson and Krivo, 2009;Rojas-Gaona et al., 2016;Voisin and Berringer, 2014). Indeed, a consistent findings in the violence literature is the enduring relationship among race, place, and violence (Friedson and Sharkey, 2015;Graif and Matthews, 2017;Griffiths, 2013;Morenoff et al., 2001). A large proportion of neighborhood studies historically emphasize the role of concentrated poverty and racial segregation on the differential rate of violence exposure among Black and Latinx youth as larger shares of these children and youth live in high poverty neighborhoods compared to the poorest of their white peers (Gibson et al., 2009;McArdle and Acevedo-Garcia, 2017;Sampson, 1993). ...
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Exposure to community violence is an epidemic problem that causes debilitating effects on youth mental health. However, the relationships between violence exposure and youth mental health remain unclear when examining co-occurring socioecological risk and protective factors. The purpose of this study is to clarify the observed gaps in knowledge by utilizing structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the mediating role of community violence exposure on the relationship between perceived neighborhood risk factors, parental behaviors, and peers on depressive symptoms in a sample of urban youth in low-income public housing communities (n = 320). Results indicate that community violence exposure and exposure to delinquent peers mediates the effects of perceived neighborhood risk and parenting behaviors on depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that while interventions that limit exposure to community violence and delinquent peers could reduce depressive symptoms, interventions that reduce community violence are essential to improve youth mental health.
... But, as later research proved, this is untrue. Segregation and homogeneity, especially in the context of capitalism, can sometimes lead to more conflict than heterogeneity, and crime is not caused by low-income populations or racial minorities (Bonilla-Silva, 1997;Griffiths, 2013). Overall, the original social disorganization theories were not explicitly racist, but theorists did not necessarily discuss the nuanced, problematic aspects of the theories thus leaving room for white supremacist ideologies to creep into research on crime, space, and place. ...
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This paper provides a comprehensive review of space‐ and place‐based criminology, with a focus on the relationship between crime, the built environment, land use, and/or physical geography, through sociological and critical geography lenses. An historical overview of major criminological and spatial theories and contributors is presented before examining the current state of the field. In honor of critical geography's goal to be “a people's geography,”1 this paper aims to be an accessible overview of space‐ and place‐based criminological research, especially for readers who are unfamiliar with these topics.
... Social disorganization can play an important role in the diffusion of homicide across geographical space. Socially disorganized neighborhoods lack the capacity for community control, increasing opportunities for illegal markets, the spread of deviant norms, and conflict (Fagan & Davies, 2004;Griffiths, 2013). Social disorganization can also create conditions favorable to the emergence and spread of criminal and organized crime groups, as residents are often neglected by state security services and lack the collective capacity to confront these groups (Cardia et al., 2003;Oliveira et al., 2015;Rengert et al., 2005). ...
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This study aims to contribute to understanding urban spatial and temporal patterns of social disorganization and homicide rates in São Paulo, Brazil (2000-2015). Using exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial panel regression techniques, we describe spatial-temporal patterns of homicide rates and assess to what extent social disorganization can explain between-district variation in homicide trajectories. The results showed some variation in the pattern of homicide decline across districts, and less disorganized communities experienced earlier, more linear declines. However, we found no evidence to suggest that changes in social disorganization are associated with differences in the decline in homicide rates.
... Minorities, regardless of sex, are more likely to reside in neighborhoods characterized by structural conditions that are linked to higher crime (e.g., Krivo and Peterson 1996;Ousey 1999;Phillips 2002;Sampson and Wilson 1995), and Blacks reside in the most disadvantaged circumstances ( Krivo and Peterson 1996;McNulty 2001). Empirical studies that account for aggregate-level differential exposure to disadvantage have found that the effects of structure on crime vary across race/ethnicity (e.g., Griffiths 2013;Krivo and Peterson 2000;Messner and Golden 1992;Ousey 1999;Steffensmeier et al. 2010), suggesting that racial/ ethnic groups may have a differential susceptibility to the structural disadvantage to which they are exposed. ...
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Objectives We draw upon theories of social disorganization, strain, and subculture of violence to examine how sex and race/ethnicity intersect to inform nonlethal violent offending at the macrolevel. Methods Using neighborhood-level incidents, we examine (1) the structural correlates of male and female nonlethal violence and (2) whether ecological conditions have variable impacts on the prevalence of White, Black, and Latino male and female offenses above and beyond differential exposure to disadvantage. We use multivariate negative binomial regression within a structural equation modeling framework which allows for the examination of the same set of indicator variables on more than one dependent variable simultaneously while accounting for covariance between the dependent variables. Results We find few significant differences in the salience of disadvantage on female and male violence across race and ethnicity although some differences emerge for White men and women. Structural factors are largely sex invariant within race and ethnicity. Conclusions Despite expectations that disadvantage would have differential effects across sex and race/ethnicity, we uncover only minor differences. This suggests that structural effects are more invariant than variant across subgroups and highlights the importance of investigating both similarities and differences when examining neighborhood structure, intersectionality, and criminal behavior.
... This general gap in scholarship has some notable exceptions. Recent research by Daniel Mears and Avinash Bhati (2006), Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo (2010), Patrick Sharkey (2014), and Elizabeth Griffiths (2013), for example, considers how spatial inequality plays an important role for social change in neighborhoods. In all of these studies, researchers find that, in varying ways, some neighborhoods experience a significant "spatial disadvantage," which may have serious implications for their crime rates (Sharkey 2014, 909). ...
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Recognition is growing that criminogenic neighborhood effects may not end at the borders of local communities , that neighborhoods are located relative to one another in ways that shape local crime rates. Inspired by this insight, this research explores the changing spatial distribution of race and income around a location and determines how such changes are associated with crime patterns and trends in neighborhoods in Los Angeles. We examine how changes from 2000 to 2010 in the income composition, racial composition, and intersection of these two constructs are linked with changes in levels of crime across local areas. We find that neighborhoods experiencing greater increases in spatial inequality in a broader area (two and a half miles around the neighborhood) experience greater increases in crime levels in the focal area over the decade, and that this pattern is strongest for neighborhoods simultaneously experiencing increasing average household income or increasing inequality. We also find that neighborhoods simultaneously experiencing increases in inequality and racial-ethnic heterogeneity experience increases in crime.
... Desert conditions seem to amplify the effects of structural disadvantage on violence, leaving neighborhoods less sensitive of incremental increases in disadvantage compared with those that exist on the edge of more stable communities. Our Desert × Disadvantage interaction term shows that, in desert communities, added disadvantage is associated with predicted decreased rather than increased levels of violence-a finding that can be situated within broader research on threshold effects and the invariance thesis (Griffiths, 2013;Hipp & Yates, 2011;Light & Harris, 2012;Taylor, 2015). Our findings here support the assertion that extreme levels of disadvantage may work to dismantle all options of local social control (Hipp & Yates, 2011). ...
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We advance discussion of structural inequality by operationalizing "concentrated" disadvantage in terms of highly disadvantaged communities located at the spatial core of contiguous areas of high disadvantage, and by testing the extent to which such location achieves an independent effect on violence. Using exploratory spatial data analysis and count modeling, we show that highly disadvantaged communities located at the center of a contiguous ghetto have significantly higher rates of violence than other highly disadvantaged communities; but, that this relationship is moderated by structural disadvantage. In addition to finding a significant interaction between these “deserts” of disadvantage and structural disadvantage as they relate to violent crime, we also observe that in desert communities, disadvantage has a diminishing effect on violence.
... First, that structural social inequalities -such as limited access to quality education, employment opportunities, medical services, housing, family support services, and transportation -are experienced by some racial and ethnic groups far more than others, which can create strain, frustration, and aggression, and lead to their differential involvement in crime (Balkwell, 1990;Blau and Blau, 1982;Lauritsen and Heimer, 2010;Massey and Eggers, 1990;Peterson, 2012;Phillips, 2002;Ulmer et al., 2012;Wright and Younts, 2009). Second, that the residential and community segregation of certain racial and ethnic groups perpetuates structural disadvantages and limits social mobility, thus preventing many people from escaping the destructive cycles of violence that create both victims and future victimizers (Griffiths, 2013;Krivo et al., 2009;Lee and Ousey, 2007;Peterson and Krivo, 1993;Peterson, 2012). And third, that historical and contemporary racial discrimination and bias have had a range of negative effects (Brunson, 2007;Duran, 2009;Weitzer and Tuch, 2004), and that for some individuals, they may increase the likelihood of criminal behavior. ...
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In the popular discourse, it is commonly assumed that mass murderers and mass shooters are different from most criminals in the United States, because they are almost always white. The present study uses data on 308 mass murderers who attacked from 2006 to 2014 to evaluate this assumption, test for racial differences between mass murderers and all other murderers, and identify characteristics of mass murderers’ behavior by race and ethnic group. Findings suggest that, overall, the racial composition of mass murderers is similar to that of other murderers, and thus may be largely explained by similar social forces, such as structural disadvantages and social inequalities. However, there are significant differences across racial and ethnic groups in attack subtype, victims killed, and attack resolution. In particular, the structural advantages and aggrieved entitlement experienced by whites may help explain their involvement in public mass shootings. Further research in both the United States and other countries may shed additional light on the behavior of mass murderers and the broader social forces that shape them.
... Most conclusions regarding the segregation-crime link stem from analyses using one of two approaches. They either examine segregation measures that summarize overall differences in the geographic locations of race-ethnic and economic groups throughout a city or metropolitan area (e.g., Feldmeyer, 2010;Krivo et al., 2009;Peterson and Krivo, 2010a) or employ spatial regression techniques that incorporate geographic clustering of crime (or another outcome) into the modeling (Cohn and Jackman, 2011;Griffiths, 2013;Griffiths and Chavez, 2004;Morenoff et al., 2001;Tita and Radil, 2010). Studies using the former approach demonstrate that crime, particularly violent crime, is higher in cities and metropolitan areas where Blacks and Latinos are segregated in different neighborhoods from Whites. ...
... As Logan (2012) suggests, more "place for space" (i.e., how space shapes human social psychology and behavior) is needed in empirical work, and indeed there has been a relative outpouring of research that examines the influence of geographical contexts on things such as health disparities (e. g., Browning and Cagney 2003), environmental degradation (e.g., Elliot and Frickel 2013), crime (e.g., Griffiths 2013), and political contention (e. g., Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto 2008). This issue of the International Journal of Sociology seeks to contribute to this growing literature by investigating urbanization as both a determinant of attitudes and social organization and a policy challenge for environmental sustainability. ...
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We merge Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and a semi-parametric, group-based trajectory procedure (TRAJ) to classify communities in Chicago by violence trajectories across space. Total, street gun and other weapon homicide trajectories are identified across 831 census tracts between 1980 and 1995. We find evidence consistent with a weapon substitution effect in violent neighborhoods that are proximate to one another, a defensive diffusion effect of exclusively street gun-specific homicide increases in neighborhoods bordering the most violent areas, and a spatial decay effect of temporal homicide trends in which the most violent areas are buffered from the least violent by places experiencing mid-range levels of lethal violence over time. In merging these two methods of data analysis, we provide a more efficient way to describe both spatial and temporal trends and make significant advances in furthering applications of space-time methodologies.
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Key Words urban crime, racial/ethnic inequality, structural disadvantage, neighborhood effects, deviance, social control ■ Abstract In 1995, Sampson & Wilson assessed the state of knowledge on race and violence and set forth an approach for future research. We review macrostructural analyses of race, ethnicity, and violent crime since 1995 to evaluate progress in ex-plaining inequality in criminal violence across racial and ethnic groups. Among the important advances are studies that attempt to gain insights from explicit comparisons of racially distinct but structurally similar communities, expansion of work beyond the black-white divide, and incorporation of macrostructural factors into multilevel models of racial/ethnic differences in violence. Yet, progress is limited in all these di-rections, and additional questions remain. Thus, we offer a perspective and suggestions for future research that will expand knowledge on this important topic.
Article
Addressing the methodological shortcomings of extant research on the racial invariance thesis, race-specific rates of intimate assault are examined across census tracts in Hamilton County, Ohio. We extend Miles-Doan's (1998) approach to examining neighborhood structural effects on intimate assault rates in order to test the racial invariance thesis. Findings reveal comparable effects of neighborhood disadvantage and population age structure on assault rates for African-American males and white males, yet a stronger effect of “disinvestment” (in marriage and in neighborhoods) on rates for African-Americans. These results conflict with previous city-level analyses demonstrating stronger structural effects on other violent crime rates for whites.
Article
Macrolevel research on the race-violence relationship has focused on the assumption of racial invariance in the effects of structural disadvantage measures on violence. Yet in most urban areas black and white disadvantage distributions only partially overlap, which precludes a critical empirical test of the assumption. I refer to this as the problem of “restricted distributions.” Using block group data for Atlanta, results show that the effect of a disadvantage index on violence is similar in black and white neighborhoods within the low range of the disadvantage distribution, but diminishes significantly at the higher levels prevalent in black areas. I discuss the implications of the findings and suggest avenues for future research.
Article
Historians of telegraphy have traditionally focused on the system-builders who invented wire communications technologies and incorporated them into profit-making enterprises. Geographers of communications have traditionally traced the changes that the telegraph network wrought on the rank-size of cities and the speed of business. Both have ignored the history of the telegraph messenger boys and the “lived geography” of the telegraph network. This article summarizes a study of telegraph messengers as both active components of technological systems and laboring agents within produced urban spaces, bringing together the fields of both history of technology and human geography.
Article
Structural theories in criminology generally assume that the effects of structural conditions on homicide are the same for all race-groups. However, previous homicide research testing this assumption contains methodological shortcomings and has produced inconsistent findings. Therefore, the validity of the “racial invariance assumption” remains highly questionable. Using 1990 data for 125 U.S. cities, this study addresses some of the limitations of previous research in an effort to provide a more definitive examination of race differences in the effects of important structural factors on homicide rates. Contrary to the expectations of the structural perspective, the results from this study reveal substantial and statistically significant race differences. Specifically, the associations between homicide and several measures of socio-economic deprivation (e.g., poverty, unemployment, income inequality, female-headed households, deprivation index) are found to be stronger among whites than blacks. A primary implication of these results is that the current versions of many structural theories need revision in order to account for observed race differences in the effects of structural factors and to explain fully the black-white gap in homicide rates.
Article
The capabilities for visualization, rapid data retrieval, and manipulation in geographic information systems (GIS) have created the need for new techniques of exploratory data analysis that focus on the “spatial” aspects of the data. The identification of local patterns of spatial association is an important concern in this respect. In this paper, I outline a new general class of local indicators of spatial association (LISA) and show how they allow for the decomposition of global indicators, such as Moran's I, into the contribution of each observation. The LISA statistics serve two purposes. On one hand, they may be interpreted as indicators of local pockets of nonstationarity, or hot spots, similar to the Gi and G*i statistics of Getis and Ord (1992). On the other hand, they may be used to assess the influence of individual locations on the magnitude of the global statistic and to identify “outliers,” as in Anselin's Moran scatterplot (1993a). An initial evaluation of the properties of a LISA statistic is carried out for the local Moran, which is applied in a study of the spatial pattern of conflict for African countries and in a number of Monte Carlo simulations.
Article
Highlighting resource inequality, social processes, and spatial interdependence, this study combines structural characteristics from the 1990 census with a survey of 8,872 Chicago residents in 1995 to predict homicide variations in 1996–1998 across 343 neighborhoods. Spatial proximity to homicide is strongly related to increased homicide rates, adjusting for internal neighborhood characteristics and prior homicide. Concentrated disadvantage and low collective efficacy—defined as the linkage of social control and cohesion—also independently predict increased homicide. Local organizations, voluntary associations, and friend/kinship networks appear to be important only insofar as they promote the collective efficacy of residents in achieving social control and cohesion. Spatial dynamics coupled with neighborhood inequalities in social and economic capacity are therefore consequential for explaining urban violence.
Article
This article proposes a new method for examining dynamic changes in thespatial distribution of a phenomenon. Recently introduced exploratoryspatial data analysis (ESDA) techniques provide social scientists with anew set of tools for distinguishing between random and nonrandom spatialpatterns of events (Anselin, 1998). Existing ESDA measures, however, arestatic and do not permit comparisons of distributions of events in the samespace but across different time periods. One ESDA method—the Moranscatterplot—has special heuristic value because it visually displayslocal spatial relationships between each spatial unit and its neighbors. Weextend this static cross-sectional view of the spatial distribution ofevents to consider dynamic features of changes over time in spatialdependencies. The method distinguishes between contagious diffusion betweenadjoining units and hierarchical diffusion that spreads broadly throughcommonly shared influences. We apply the method to homicide data, lookingfor evidence of spatial diffusion of youth-gang homicides acrossneighborhoods in a city. Contagious diffusion between neighboring censustracts is evident only during the year of peak growth in total homicides,when high local rates of youth-gang homicides are followed by significantincreases in neighboring youth- nongang rates. This pattern is consistentwith a spread of homicides from gang youth to nongang youth. Otherwise, theincreases in both youth-gang and youth- nongang homicides generally occursimultaneously in nonneighboring tracts.
Article
This article introduces the use of regression models based on the Poissondistribution as a tool for resolving common problems in analyzing aggregatecrime rates. When the population size of an aggregate unit is small relativeto the offense rate, crime rates must be computed from a small number ofoffenses. Such data are ill-suited to least-squares analysis. Poisson-basedregression models of counts of offenses are preferable because they arebuilt on assumptions about error distributions that are consistent withthe nature of event counts. A simple elaboration transforms the Poissonmodel of offense counts to a model of per capita offense rates. Todemonstrate the use and advantages of this method, this article presentsanalyses of juvenile arrest rates for robbery in 264 nonmetropolitancounties in four states. The negative binomial variant of Poisson regressioneffectively resolved difficulties that arise in ordinary least-squaresanalyses.
Article
This paper examines the relationships among unemployment, crime, and family disruption in the black "underclass." The main hypothesis tested is that the effect of black adult male joblessness on black crime is mediated largely through its effects on family disruption. The study examines race-specific rates of robbery and homicide by juveniles and adults in over 150 U.S. cities in 1980. The results show that the scarcity of employed black men increases the prevalence of families headed by females in black communities. In turn, black family disruption substantially increases the rates of black murder and robbery, especially by juveniles. These effects are independent of income, region, race and age composition, density, city size, and welfare benefits and are similar to the effects of white family disruption on white violence. The paper concludes that there is nothing inherent in black culture that is conducive to crime. Rather, persistently high rates of black crime appear to stem from the structural linkages among underemployment, economic deprivation, and family disruption in urban black communities. Sociology
Article
Shaw and McKay's influential theory of community social disorganization has never been directly tested. To address this, a community-level theory that builds on Shaw and McKay's original model is formulated and tested. The general hypothesis is that low economic status, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility, and family disruption lead to community social disorganization, which, in turn, increases crime and delinquency rates. A community's level of social organization is measure in terms of local friendship networks, control of street-corner teenage peer groups, and prevalence of organizational participation. The model is first tested by analyzing data for 238 localities in Great Britain constructed from a 1982 national survey of 10,905 residents. The model is then replicated on an independent national sample of 11,030 residents of 300 British localities in 1984. Results from both surveys support the theory and show that between-community variations in social disorganization transmit much of the effect of community structural characteristics on rates of both criminal victimization and criminal offending. Sociology
Spatial Analyses of Crime Measurement and Analysis of Crime and Justice
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Homicide in Four Cities Data Set
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Neighborhood Change Data Base (NCDB) East Brunswick Merging Methods for Examining Homicide Trends Across Space and Time
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Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant
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