One of the unintended consequences of decades-long public housing policy has been to concentrate the poor within communities that are at the extreme end of economic disadvantage. More than in other types of disadvantaged communities,... more
One of the unintended consequences of decades-long public housing policy has been to concentrate the poor within communities that are at the extreme end of economic disadvantage. More than in other types of disadvantaged communities, living in public housing can sharply circumscribe the social world of its residents and isolate them from people and social institutions in surrounding areas. This study draws on the concepts of social isolation from urban sociology and offending " awareness space " from environmental criminology to explain why violence rates are dramatically higher in public housing compared to otherwise disadvantaged nonpublic housing neighborhoods and, moreover, whether residents or outsiders are responsible for the violence. Using homicide data for the Southeast Policing Area of Los Angeles (1980 through 1999), and relating the location of homicides within and outside of public housing to the places of residence of both victims and offenders, our research reveals that public housing developments are hotbeds of violence involving predominantly local residents. There is no evidence that public housing serves as either a magnet for violence by drawing in nonlocal offenders, or a generator of violence in surrounding neighborhoods. We conclude that this social isolation from the larger community can both escalate violence between residents inside public housing, but also limit their offending awareness space, such that the violence is contained from spreading beyond the development.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research has produced a wealth of knowledge on the victims, offenders, and circumstances of homicide incidents. This research, however, is seldom tied to community-based homicide prevention initiatives. This article compares patterns of... more
Research has produced a wealth of knowledge on the victims, offenders, and circumstances of homicide incidents. This research, however, is seldom tied to community-based homicide prevention initiatives. This article compares patterns of homicide across five Project Safe Neighborhood sites and presents an example of how homicide characteristics in local communities can be tied to specific local prevention strategies. Finally, the
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Highly clustered event sequences are observed in certain types of crime data, such as burglary and gang violence, due to crime specic patterns of criminal behavior. Similar clustering patterns are observed by seismologists, as earthquakes... more
Highly clustered event sequences are observed in certain types of crime data, such as burglary and gang violence, due to crime specic patterns of criminal behavior. Similar clustering patterns are observed by seismologists, as earthquakes are well known to increase the risk of subsequent earthquakes, or aftershocks, nearby the location of an initial event. Space-time clustering is modeled in
Research Interests:
Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces -- from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly... more
Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces -- from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths, through to the massive global guilds in online role-playing games for which membership currently exceeds tens of millions of people from all possible backgrounds, age-groups and genders. We have compiled and analyzed data for these two seemingly unrelated offline and online human activities, and have uncovered an unexpected quantitative link between them. Although their overall dynamics differ visibly, we find that a common team-based model can accurately reproduce the quantitative features of each simply by adjusting the average tolerance level and attribute range for each population. By contrast, we find no evidence to support a version of the model based on like-seeking-like (i.e. kinship or `homophily').
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Serious injuries and deaths of three samples of boys were examined in an inner-city, longitudinal study. By age 19, almost 1 in 10 of the 506 participants in the oldest sample had been seriously wounded or killed. Two thirds of this group... more
Serious injuries and deaths of three samples of boys were examined in an inner-city, longitudinal study. By age 19, almost 1 in 10 of the 506 participants in the oldest sample had been seriously wounded or killed. Two thirds of this group had been either wounded or killed by guns. Victims, compared to controls, tended to have a history of engaging in serious delinquency, gang fights, and selling drugs. They also tended to carry guns. The delinquent lifestyle of the victims was also evident from their court records. Victims tended to do poorly academically in school, received poorer parental supervision, had poorer communication with their parents, and had a long history of behavior problems.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
We develop a mathematical framework aimed at analyzing repeat and near-repeat eects in crime data. Parsing data according to dierent counting methods, we determine the probability distribution functions for the time interval ¿ between... more
We develop a mathematical framework aimed at analyzing repeat and near-repeat eects in crime data. Parsing data according to dierent counting methods, we determine the probability distribution functions for the time interval ¿ between repeat oenses. One of the main focuses of this paper is the fact that, even under the assumption that crimes are random and uncorrelated, these probability
Research has long established that crime is not randomly distributed, and spatial regression models of crime have clearly demonstrated that crime patterns cannot be explained merely by the socio-economic characteristics of a particular... more
Research has long established that crime is not randomly distributed, and spatial regression models of crime have clearly demonstrated that crime patterns cannot be explained merely by the socio-economic characteristics of a particular place. These findings are a reminder that “space matters” and that neighborhoods are not analytically independent units. Modeling the clustering of crime through spatial regression requires two important decisions. First, one must choose a unit of analysis that is consistent with the social processes believed to be driving the observed patterns. Second, one must consider the relationships among these units such that the model captures the influence the activities in other areas have on outcomes in the neighborhood. Within criminology, this second feature has been given insufficient consideration. Instead, the connectedness of spatial units has been taken as given and modeled solely through adjacency or a distance decay function. This chapter critiques such inductive approaches used to model and explain the spatial distribution of crime. Drawing upon the modeling of network autocorrelation within the social influence literature, we describe a deductive approach wherein specific social processes are posited, measured and modeled a priori. An empirical example using gang violence demonstrates this deductive approach and we find that the spatial distribution of violence is influenced by neighbors defined by the socio-spatial dimensions of gang rivalries rather than simply by geographically contiguous neighbors. We emphasize that a complete discussion of the appropriate unit of analysis must also consider the spatial dimensions of the social phenomena thought to be responsible for the spatial patterning.
Research Interests:
Research has produced a wealth of knowledge on the victims, offenders, and circumstances of homicide incidents. This research, however, is seldom tied to community-based homicide prevention initiatives. This article compares patterns of... more
Research has produced a wealth of knowledge on the victims, offenders, and circumstances of homicide incidents. This research, however, is seldom tied to community-based homicide prevention initiatives. This article compares patterns of homicide across five Project Safe Neighborhood sites and presents an example of how homicide characteristics in local communities can be tied to specific local prevention strategies. Finally, the
Research Interests:
... and political processes, these communities are thought to provide a supportive milieu for delinquent subcultures (Anderson 1990; Vigil 2002; Wilson ... This finding is consistent with RickGrannis's research (1998) on... more
... and political processes, these communities are thought to provide a supportive milieu for delinquent subcultures (Anderson 1990; Vigil 2002; Wilson ... This finding is consistent with RickGrannis's research (1998) on "T-Communities" where he finds that social ties rarely span ...
Research Interests:
Most prior research testing the hypothesis of the social disorganization theory that residential instability increases crime has used cross-sectional data. Using a unique dataset linking home sales address matched to census tracts with... more
Most prior research testing the hypothesis of the social disorganization theory that residential instability increases crime has used cross-sectional data. Using a unique dataset linking home sales address matched to census tracts with crime data in Los Angeles, we test the ...
Research Interests:
The mechanisms driving the nucleation, spread, and dissipation of crime hotspots are poorly understood. As a consequence, the ability of law enforcement agencies to use mapped crime patterns to design crime prevention strategies is... more
The mechanisms driving the nucleation, spread, and dissipation of crime hotspots are poorly understood. As a consequence, the ability of law enforcement agencies to use mapped crime patterns to design crime prevention strategies is severely hampered. We also lack robust expectations about how different policing interventions should impact crime. Here we present a mathematical framework based on reaction-diffusion partial differential equations for studying the dynamics of crime hotspots. The system of equations is based on empirical evidence for how offenders move and mix with potential victims or targets. Analysis shows that crime hotspots form when the enhanced risk of repeat crimes diffuses locally, but not so far as to bind distant crime together. Crime hotspots may form as either supercritical or subcritical bifurcations, the latter the result of large spikes in crime that override linearly stable, uniform crime distributions. Our mathematical methods show that subcritical crime hotspots may be permanently eradicated with police suppression, whereas supercritical hotspots are displaced following a characteristic spatial pattern. Our results thus provide a mechanistic explanation for recent failures to observe crime displacement in experimental field tests of hotspot policing.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
... However, the qualitative studies cited above suggest that too much violence can be a bad thing for the gang. ... Prior to 1992, violent urban street gangs were nonexistent in Pittsburgh ... We model the 911 call counts in a Poisson... more
... However, the qualitative studies cited above suggest that too much violence can be a bad thing for the gang. ... Prior to 1992, violent urban street gangs were nonexistent in Pittsburgh ... We model the 911 call counts in a Poisson regression model shown in equation 1. We include an ...
Research Interests:
Crime serves as an important catalyst for change in the socio-economic composition of communities. While such change occurs over a long period of time, crime is capitalized into local housing markets quickly and thus provides an early... more
Crime serves as an important catalyst for change in the socio-economic composition of communities. While such change occurs over a long period of time, crime is capitalized into local housing markets quickly and thus provides an early indicator of neighborhood transition. Using hedonic regression, we quantify this “intangible cost” of crime and extend the crime-housing price literature in several important
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Abstract There are numerous instances in which researchers wish to measure the rate of intra- or inter-group interactions (whether positive or negative). When computing such measures as rates there is great uncertainty regarding the... more
Abstract There are numerous instances in which researchers wish to measure the rate of intra- or inter-group interactions (whether positive or negative). When computing such measures as rates there is great uncertainty regarding the appropriate denominator: we analytically ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Given the severity of the crime and the lengthy sentences often accompanying convictions, homicide tends to be seen as the culminating event in a criminal career. In an attempt to better understand the types of individuals who commit... more
Given the severity of the crime and the lengthy sentences often accompanying convictions, homicide tends to be seen as the culminating event in a criminal career. In an attempt to better understand the types of individuals who commit homicide, many studies have examined the offense history of those convicted of murder and manslaughter. Only recently have researchers begun to realize
Research Interests:
The presence of ongoing enterprises, sustained by a purpose and life beyond those of the current participants, distinguishes drug- and gang-related homicides. Without these enterprises that are sustained over time within distinctive... more
The presence of ongoing enterprises, sustained by a purpose and life beyond those of the current participants, distinguishes drug- and gang-related homicides. Without these enterprises that are sustained over time within distinctive spatial areas, violence would be reduced to individual acts precipitated by unique features of interactions between distinct individuals. Consistent with expectation, drug and gang homicides display substantial concentrations of violent incidents spatially and temporally within different neighborhoods in a city. The authors also find evidence for localized temporal dependencies in which a recent homicide alters the probability of another homicide in the same local area. Both drug and gang homicides display evidence of self-limiting suppression effects that inhibit extended periods of sustained high rates of these types of violence in the same area. Finally, there is evidence of cross-type diffusion from drug and gang homicides to subsequently higher rates of other gun homicides involving young offenders or victims.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Abstract: this report was conducted by RANDPublic Safety and Justice for the National Institute of Justice undergrant No. 98-LJ-CX-0043
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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... more
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
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT Theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that fear of violence will cause consumers, employees and entrepreneurs to alter their routine activities in areas that experience a surge in violent activity. This paper argues that... more
ABSTRACT Theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that fear of violence will cause consumers, employees and entrepreneurs to alter their routine activities in areas that experience a surge in violent activity. This paper argues that understanding how businesses respond to violence has important implications for understanding community crime cycles and offers further evidence of how crime impacts the choices individuals make with regard to where they live, shop and work. Using newly available longitudinal business data and homicide data disaggregated to the ZIP code level, an examination is made of the impact of violence surges on the creation, destruction and growth of business establishments in five large US cities between 1987 and 1994. Controlling for pre-existing levels of violence, it is found that increased violence has the greatest consequences for service-related establishments in low-crime neighbourhoods. This finding is consistent with the notion that the fear of victimisation imposes additional indirect costs to society through its negative impact on local business establishments.
Research Interests:
The new century brings with it growing interest in crime places. This interest spans theory from the perspective of understanding the etiol- ogy of crime, and practice from the perspective of developing effec- tive criminal justice... more
The new century brings with it growing interest in crime places. This interest spans theory from the perspective of understanding the etiol- ogy of crime, and practice from the perspective of developing effec- tive criminal justice interventions to reduce crime. We do not attempt a comprehensive treatment of the substantial body of theoretical and empirical research on place and crime
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This chapter explores the ways in which space shapes the territoriality of urban street gang members as well as the ways in which a gang exploits the local landscape. It begins by providing a brief overview of the classic works on the... more
This chapter explores the ways in which space shapes the territoriality of urban street gang members as well as the ways in which a gang exploits the local landscape. It begins by providing a brief overview of the classic works on the emergence of gangs, paying particular attention both to the literature on human terrain/territoriality and to the ecological studies of place, especially the Chicago school. It then looks at the criminal enterprises of gangs as they relate to space. Next, it investigates how residency, technology, and territoriality may be influencing the relationship modern street gangs have with space. It concludes with a look at the use of geographically targeted policing to curtail gang activity, especially intergang violence.