POVERTY, INCOME INEQUALITY, AND COMMUNITY CRIME RATES

This paper examines the relationship between crime rates and aggregate economic conditions for 57 small social areas. The principal analyses address a continuing controversy—are community crime rates associated with absolute poverty, relative poverty (i.e., income inequality), or both. Using victimization data from 57 small residential neighborhoods, the analyses examine the association between absolute and relative poverty and rates of violent crime and burglary. The findings indicate that absolute poverty is more strongly associated with neighborhood crime rates, although the relationship is conditional on the type of crime considered. The implications of the findings are discussed within a perspective of community social control.     

Risky Firearms Behavior in Low-Income Families of Elementary School Children: The Impact of Poverty, Fear of Crime, and Crime Victimization on Keeping and Storing Firearms

This report examines possession and storage of firearms in low-income urban families with at least one child between 8 and 12 years of age. The data primarily consisted of responses to a survey administered to parents, but these data were supplemented by records obtained from discussion groups composed of children between 8 and 12 years of age. The data were collected from five low-income neighborhoods in a medium sized city in the Pacific Northwest as part of a larger study focusing on the presence of risk factors for substance abuse, violence, and gang activity. All five neighborhoods are known to be plagued by poverty, violence, substance abuse, and gang activity. To make our findings more understandable, we compared our findings from these neighborhoods to similar data from a middle-class neighborhood. Middle-class parents were twice as likely to have firearms in their homes, but were much less likely to keep them loaded and/or unlocked. High rates of victimization, fear of crime, self-protective behavior, and exposure to threats or attacks were associated with keeping firearms for protection and engaging in risky gun behavior in the home.     

ESCAPING CRIME: THE EFFECTS OF DIRECT AND INDIRECT VICTIMIZATION ON MOVING*

This article investigates the impact of criminal victimization on household residential mobility. Existing research finds that direct experiences with crime influence mobility decisions, such that persons who suffer offenses near their homes are more likely to move. The current study extends this line of inquiry to consider whether indirect victimization that involves neighbors also stimulates moving. The analysis uses the National Crime Survey to estimate multilevel models that incorporate data from individual households and their spatially proximate neighbors. The results show that the link between direct victimization and moving continues to hold after controlling for neighborhood context. Indirect property victimization also leads to moving, with effects about equal in size to those of direct victimization. In contrast, no evidence is found that violent victimization that occurs in neighboring homes influences mobility, probably because most of these events are nonstranger violence that provokes less anxiety for neighbors.     

DESTINATION EFFECTS: RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY AND TRAJECTORIES OF ADOLESCENT VIOLENCE IN A STRATIFIED METROPOLIS*

Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility—the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiments in five cities—have produced conflicting results and have created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question, we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9–12 years from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago—the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving across three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence; whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an increased risk of violence, moves outside the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence. The gap in violence between movers within and outside Chicago is explained not only by the racial and economic composition of the destination neighborhoods but also by the quality of school contexts, adolescents' perceived control over their new environment, and fear. These findings highlight the need to simultaneously consider residential mobility, mechanisms of neighborhood change, and the wider geography of structural opportunity.     

Dangerous Places: Gang Members and Neighborhood Levels of Gun Assault

Despite attention to the role of gangs in urban gun violence, much remains to be learned about the spatial distribution and consequences of residential gang membership. This study uses data from St. Louis to examine the effects of resident gang membership on rates of gun assault. We also consider whether gun violence is conditioned by the level of gang membership in surrounding communities. As anticipated, communities with the highest number of gang members also have the highest rates of gun assault. However, much of the impact of gang membership on gun assaults extends outside of the boundaries of gang neighborhoods, especially those neighborhoods with few or no gang members. The number of gang members in surrounding neighborhoods has no discernible effect on gun assaults in communities with higher rates of gang membership. Finally, controlling for the spatial proximity of residential gang membership helps to account for some of the association between neighborhood disadvantage and gun assaults.     

The Old Jim Crow: Racial Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Imprisonment

This article examines the impact of racial residential segregation on imprisonment rates at the neighborhood level. Key to the strength of this enterprise is block‐group level data on imprisonment, crime, and other demographic factors for about 5,000 neighborhoods in North Carolina. These data also include information on county racial residential segregation from the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Hierarchical linear models that control for neighborhood characteristics, such as racial diversity, crime, poverty, unemployment, median income, homeownership, and other factors, show that neighborhoods in more segregated counties have higher imprisonment rates than neighborhoods in less segregated counties. On average, neighborhoods in counties with segregation levels at the minimum of 41.4 are expected to have imprisonment rates of 0.186 percent, while neighborhoods in counties with segregation levels at the maximum of 95.6 are expected to have imprisonment rates more than twice as high, or about 0.494 percent.     

REEXAMINING SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY USING CALLS TO THE POLICE AS A MEASURE OF CRIME*

This study examines social disorganization theory using calls to the police during 1980 in 60 Boston neighborhoods. These data, based on complainant reports of crime rather than official police reports, allow further investigation of differences in findings based on victimization data and official crime data. The rates of assault, robbery, and burglary are regressed on poverty, mobility, racial heterogeneity, family disruption, and structural density. Interaction terms for poverty and heterogeneity, poverty and mobility, and mobility and heterogeneity are also explored. Results from this study support findings from recent victimization studies and earlier ecological studies using official counts of crime. Poverty and heterogeneity, along with family disruption and structural density, are found to be important ecological variables for understanding the distribution of crime rates among neighborhoods.     

DELINQUENCY AND GENDER MODERATION IN THE MOVING TO OPPORTUNITY INTERVENTION: THE ROLE OF EXTENDED NEIGHBORHOODS

A long history of research has indicated that neighborhood poverty increases youth's risk taking and delinquency. This literature predominantly has treated neighborhoods as independent of their surroundings despite rapidly growing ecological evidence on the geographic clustering of crime that suggests otherwise. This study proposes that to understand neighborhood effects, investigating youth's wider surroundings holds theoretical and empirical value. By revisiting longitudinal data on more than 1500 low‐income youth who participated in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized intervention, this article explores the importance of extended neighborhoods (neighborhoods and surroundings) and different concentrated disadvantage configurations in shaping gender differences in risk taking and delinquency. The results from two‐stage, least‐squares analyses suggest that the extended neighborhoods matter and they matter differently by gender. Among girls, extended neighborhoods without concentrated disadvantage were associated with lower risk‐taking prevalence than extended neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage. In contrast, among boys, localized concentration of disadvantage was associated with the highest prevalence of risk taking and delinquency. Interactions between the immediate and surrounding neighborhoods were similarly associated with differential opportunity and social disorganization mediators. Among the more critical potential mediators of the link between localized disadvantage and boys’ risk taking were delinquent network ties, strain, and perceived absence of legitimate opportunities for success.     

THE EFFECT OF CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION ON A HOUSEHOLD'S MOVING DECISION*

Only a small body of research addresses the impact of criminal victimization on moving (Skogan, 1990; Taub et al. 1984). Knowledge of this under-researched relationship is important for three reasons. First, moving is costly to the victim both in monetary and psychological terms. Second, if a victimization-mobility relationship exists, then it may partially explain why people migrate to suburban areas from cities. Third, because residential mobility reduces social control that, in turn, potentially results in more crime, evidence that criminal victimization leads to more mobility may help explain a cycle that perpetuates disorder and neighborhood decline (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993; Horwitz, 1990; Miethe and Meier, 1994; Skogan, 1990; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981). This study uses a longitudinal version of the National Crime Survey that includes 22, 375 households to test the hypothesis that criminal victimization is associated with an increased probability that a household moves.     

The Impact of Self Control and Neighborhood Disorder on Bullying Victimization

PurposeWhereas past research has examined the effect of individual-level and neighborhood-level predictors of bullying victimization separately, the current study examines their effects collectively.MethodsMiddle and high school students (n = 1972) in randomly selected classes within a Southeastern school district completed a battery of self-report measures. Levels of self-control (an individual-level factor) and neighborhood disorganization (a neighborhood-level factor) were regressed onto measures of the six-week prevalence of verbal, physical, and cyber bullying victimization.ResultsLow self-control and neighborhood disorder were found to be associated with each type of bullying victimization, though the impact of self-control was partially mediated by neighborhood disorder when included in the same model. The effect of self-control was mediated when subsequently controlling for poly-victimization experiences. Net of these controls, neighborhood disorder continued to be associated with a statistically significant increase in the odds of bullying victimization.ConclusionsEconomic and social decay within neighborhoods increased the likelihood of bullying victimizations. These effects hold true across verbal, physical and cyber victimizations, suggesting a need to consider both community characteristics when staging bullying intervention campaigns. Additionally, the findings suggest a need for further research considering the relationship between self-control and neighborhood conditions on the risk of victimization generally.     

Mass Reentry,Neighborhood Context and Recidivism: Examining How the Distribution of Parolees Within and Across Neighborhoods Impacts Recidivism

Recent scholarship focuses on the role neighborhood context plays in reoffending. These studies lack an examination of how the size of the parolee population at the neighborhood-level impacts individual recidivism. We examine how the size and clustering of parolee populations within and across neighborhoods impacts individual-level recidivism. Using data from parolees returning to three Ohio cities from 2000 to 2009, we examine how concentrations of parolees in neighborhoods and in the surrounding neighborhoods impact the likelihood of reoffending. We also examine whether parolee clustering conditions the relationship between neighborhood-level characteristics and recidivism. Results show concentrated reentry increases recidivism, while parolees in stable neighborhoods are less likely to recidivate. Also, the positive effect of parolee concentration is tempered when parolees return to stable neighborhoods. These findings suggest that augmenting resources available in neighborhoods saturated by parolees, as well as bolstering residential stability in these same neighborhoods might reduce reoffending.     

SPATIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE EFFECT OF NEIGHBORHOOD DISADVANTAGE ON DELINQUENCY*

Research examining the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and adolescent offending typically examines only the influence of residential neighborhoods. This strategy may be problematic as 1) neighborhoods are rarely spatially independent of each other and 2) adolescents spend an appreciable portion of their time engaged in activities outside of their immediate neighborhood. Therefore, characteristics of neighborhoods outside of, but geographically proximate to, residential neighborhoods may affect adolescents’ propensity to engage in delinquent behavior. We append a spatially lagged, distance‐weighted measure of socioeconomic disadvantage in “extralocal” neighborhoods to the individual records of respondents participating in the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (N = 6,491). Results from negative binomial regression analyses indicate that the level of socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods is inversely associated with youth offending, as theories of relative deprivation, structured opportunity, and routine activities would predict, and that the magnitude of this effect rivals that of the level of disadvantage in youths’ own residential neighborhoods. Moreover, socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods suppresses the criminogenic influence of socioeconomic disadvantage in youths’ own neighborhoods, revealing stronger effects of local neighborhood disadvantage than would otherwise be observed.     

IMPACT OF VICTIMIZATION ON RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY: EXPLAINING RACIAL AND ETHNIC PATTERNS USING THE NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY

Criminal victimization is known to influence households’ moving decisions, but theories suggest that the processes leading to a moving decision can vary across racial and ethnic groups. Drawing from current literature, we hypothesized that victimization would have a stronger effect on moving decisions for Whites than for Blacks or Hispanics, and that racial/ethnic residential segregation would moderate the impact of victimization on mobility. Using a longitudinal sample of 34,134 housing units compiled from the National Crime Victimization Survey for the 40 largest metropolitan areas in the United States (1995–2003), we found results that both support and contradict the hypotheses. Specifically, White residents display consistent evidence that victimization is a significant predictor of household mobility. Blacks and Hispanics, in contrast, are more varied in their moving behavior after victimization. In addition, significant differences exist among these groups in responses to victimization and in how mobility is influenced by residential segregation. Higher levels of residential segregation play a part in the victimization–mobility relationship among Blacks in a way that is more complex than we hypothesized.     

The Privatization of Public Safety in Urban Neighborhoods: Do Business Improvement Districts Reduce Violent Crime Among Adolescents?

The business improvement district (BID) is a popular economic development and urban revitalization model in which local property and business owners must pay an assessment tax that funds supplementary services, including private security. BIDs constitute a controversial form of urban revitalization to some because they privatize economic development and public safety efforts in public space. This study examines whether BIDs provide tangible benefits beyond their immediate boundaries to local residents in the form of reduced violence among adolescents. The empirical analysis advances an existing literature dominated by evaluation studies by introducing a theoretically driven dataset with rich information on individual and neighborhood level variables. The analysis compares violent victimization among youths living in BID neighborhoods with those in similarly situated non‐BID neighborhoods. We find no effect of BIDs on violence. However, we do find that youth violence is strongly correlated with neighborhood collective efficacy and family‐related attributes of social control. In conclusion, we argue that BIDs may be an agent of crime reduction, but this benefit is likely concentrated only in their immediate boundaries and does not extend to youths living in surrounding neighborhoods.     

INCOME INEQUALITY,RACE, AND PLACE: DOES THE DISTRIBUTION OF RACE AND CLASS WITHIN NEIGHBORHOODS AFFECT CRIME RATES?*

This study tests the effects of neighborhood inequality and heterogeneity on crime rates. The results of this study, which were obtained by using a large sample of census tracts in 19 cities in 2000, provide strong evidence of the importance of racial/ethnic heterogeneity for the amount of all types of crime generally committed by strangers, even controlling for the effects of income inequality. Consistent with predictions of several theories, greater overall inequality in the tract was associated with higher crime rates, particularly for violent types of crime. Strong evidence revealed that within racial/ethnic group inequality increases crime rates: Only the relative deprivation model predicted this association. An illuminating finding is that the effect of tract poverty on robbery and murder becomes nonsignificant when the level of income inequality is taken into account; this finding suggests that past studies that failed to take income inequality into account may have inappropriately attributed causal importance to poverty. This large sample also provides evidence that it is the presence of homeowners, rather than residential stability (as measured by the average length of residence), that significantly reduces the level of crime in neighborhoods.     

Using data on offender mobility in ecological research

This article presents some findings on neighborhood structure, police recorded crime, and offender mobility for the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The highest crime rates were found in the inner-city neighborhoods. The findings further show that the occurrence of different types of petty crime in residential neighborhoods is associated with different neighborhood characteristics. It was found that offenders reside predominantly in lower-social status neighborhoods. Using data on offender mobility it is shown that violent crime and vandalism are the more locally committed crimes, as compared to residential burglary and other property crime. Finally, it is proposed that data on offender mobility can be used to gain more insight into the link between certain neighborhood characteristics and crime.     

THE EFFECTS OF RESIDENTIAL TURNOVER ON HOUSEHOLD VICTIMIZATION*

Americans move frequently, and moving alters their risks of victimization. This study uses unique longitudinal, multilevel data from the 1980–1985 National Crime Survey to examine the effects of residential turnover on household victimization. The two major findings of the study are as follows: First, housing turnover is a transition that independently increases the risk that a dwelling will experience a crime. This finding is true even controlling for persistent differences in crime vulnerability between dwellings. Second, changes in the composition and routine activities of households also alter the risks of victimization. These findings provide support for social disorganization and crime opportunity theories.     

Perceived community cohesion and perceived risk of victimization: A cross-national analysis

Prior research illustrates that community characteristics may be associated with the perceived risk of victimization. In our analysis, we suggest that cognitive evaluations of the risk of victimization within one's neighborhood may be shaped by cognitive assessments of the willingness of community members to help each other. We test this link using data for 11 countries from the 1992 wave of the International Crime Survey. The data provide substantial support for the hypothesis that individuals who perceive their communities to be cohesive express lower levels of perceived risk of criminal victimization in their neighborhoods.     

Neighborhood structure differences between homicide victims and non-victims

While there were numerous studies documenting the neighborhood characteristics that led to increased risk of crime victimization, very little was done to compare the neighborhoods of homicide victims to non-victims. The current research used the case-control design to alleviate this gap in the research. A sample of homicide victims and non-victims collected from Prince George's County, Maryland, in 1993, was used to make these comparisons. Significant differences were noted in the macro-level measures of education, unemployment, household income, and percentage of female-headed households in the neighborhoods of victims and non-victims. Individual elements, such as age, race, gender, and arrest were also strongly associated with the risk of homicide victimization. Both macro and micro level variables needed to be included when studying factors that increased the risk of homicide victimization.