Using Social Media to Measure Temporal Ambient Population: Does it Help Explain Local Crime Rates?

A challenge for studies assessing routine activities theory is accounting for the spatial and temporal confluence of offenders and targets given that people move about during the daytime and nighttime. We propose exploiting social media (Twitter) data to construct estimates of the population at various locations at different times of day, and assess whether these estimates help predict the amount of crime during two-hour time periods over the course of the day. We address these questions using crime data for 97,428 blocks in the Southern California region, along with geocoded information on tweets in the region over an eight month period. The results show that this measure of the temporal ambient population helps explain the level of crime in blocks during particular time periods. The use of social media data appear promising for testing various implications of routine activities and crime pattern theories, given their explicit spatial and temporal nature.     

Can Tort Law Be Moral?

According to the established orthodoxy, the law of private wrongs—especially common law torts—fails to map onto our moral universe. Four objections in particular have caught the imagination of skeptics about the moral foundations of tort law: They purport to cast doubt over the moral appeal of the duty of care element; they target the seemingly inegalitarian objective standard of care; they object to the morally arbitrary elements of factual causation and harm; and they complain about the unnecessary extension of liability under the guise of the proximate cause element. Analyzing these four prevailing arguments concerning the a‐moral (and, with regard to some interpretations, anti‐moral) character of tort law, I shall seek to show that the normative structure of tort law can, nonetheless, be reconstructed so as to reflect, to an important extent, our considered judgments about basic moral principles.     

White-Collar Crime and Police Crime: Rotten Apples or Rotten Barrels?

In the research literature on white-collar crime, there seems to be a tendency to claim individual failure rather than systems failure. Occupational crime is often emphasized at the expense of corporate crime. In the research literature on misconduct and crime by police officers, however, there seems to be a tendency to claim systems failure. It is argued that police crime is a result of bad practice, lack of resources or mismanagement, rather than acts of criminals. Based on two empirical studies in Norway of business and police crime, this paper is concerned with the extent to which the rotten apple theory versus the rotten barrel theory can explain crime in business organizations and police organizations.     

Banking Options and Neighborhood Crime: Does Fringe Banking Increase Neighborhood Crime?

In the past few years, scholars interested in neighborhoods and crime have turned their attention to the role of neighborhood organizations. Recently, (Kubrin, Squires, Graves, and Ousey, Criminology & Public Policy, 10(2), 437–466, 2011) examined the impact of payday lenders on neighborhood crime. They found that there is a significant relationship between payday lenders, and both violent and property crime rates. The current research builds upon their work by exploring banking options in the city of Norfolk, Virginia. Findings indicate that the presence of payday lenders is significantly related to property crime in 2010 and violent crime in 2010, though the findings for violent crimes are not robust. Also there is a mild suppression effect predicting violent crime rates once socioeconomic deprivation is controlled. Pawn shops are not significantly related to either property or violent crimes. Interestingly banks are significant positive predictors of both property and violent crimes. The difference between the findings here and those of (Kubrin, Squires, Graves, and Ousey, Criminology & Public Policy, 10(2), 437–466, 2011) are discussed.     

Family Law: Values Beyond Choice and Autonomy?

Law and Philosophy -     

Can Cohort Replacement Explain Changes in the Relationship Between Age and Homicide Offending?

This paper focuses on shifts in the age distribution of homicide offending in the United States. This distribution remained remarkably stable with small but significant changes over a long period of time. Then between 1985 and 1990 the rates of homicide offending doubled for 15-to-19 year olds and increased nearly 40% for 20-to-24 year olds, while the homicide offending rates decreased for those over 30. In addition to this “epidemic of youth homicide,” which lasted through the mid-1990s, there have been systematic changes in the age distribution of homicide in the United States associated with cohort replacement over the past 40 years. We introduce an estimable function approach for estimating the effects of age, period, and cohort. The method allows us to assess simultaneously the impacts of periods and cohorts on the age distribution of homicide offending. We find that although the age curve remains relatively stable, there are shifts in it associated systematically with cohort replacement. Cohort replacement accounts for nearly half of the upturn in youth homicides during the epidemic of youth homicides, but a significant fraction of that upturn is not associated with cohort replacement.

Empty Homes and Acquisitive Crime: Does Vacancy Type Matter?

American Journal of Criminal Justice - Research suggests that vacant homes are associated with a variety of negative outcomes for communities, including higher rates of some crimes. A few studies...     

What Can We do to Engender a More Rational and Less Punitive Crime Policy?

This paper examines the question of what can we do, at a practical level, to respond to penal populism. It is argued that a comprehensive understanding of the nature of penal populism provides the best base for considering a range of responses across the full spectrum of precipitating factors. The paper begins with a sketch of the main understanding of penal populism articulated in earlier works, principally Roberts et al. (2003), then the putative causes of penal populism are expanded considering the contributions of precipitating factors at six levels. A number of suggestions and strategies at each of the six levels is then provided. Rather than being competing these strategies at different levels are seen as complementary although some will be more realizable than others. The paper finishes with a focus on the topic of public inclusion into the development of policy. A democratization of policy, it is argued, is crucial and, ultimately, the most profound way of addressing the challenge of penal populism.     

When Is a Regime Not a Legal System? Alexy on Moral Correctness and Social Efficacy

Robert Alexy defines law as including a claim to moral correctness and demonstrating social efficacy. This paper argues that law's social efficacy is not merely an observable fact but is undergirded by moral commitments by rulers that it is possible for their subjects to follow the rules, that the rulers and others will also follow the rules, that subjects will be protected from violence if they act in accordance with the rules, and that subjects will be entitled to legal redress if others act violently towards them otherwise than in accordance with the rules. Alexy is correct in his conclusion that a system of norms that is not by and large socially efficacious is not a valid legal system, but wrong insofar as he follows legal positivism in distinguishing this aspect of law's validity from law's claim to moral correctness.     

Police,Crime and the Problem of Weak Instruments: Revisiting the “More Police,Less Crime” Thesis

Objectives

A key question in the general deterrence literature has been the extent to which the police reduce crime. Definitive answers to this statement, however, are difficult to come by because while more police may reduce crime, higher crime rates may also increase police levels, by triggering the hiring of more police. One way to help overcome this problem is through the use of instrumental variables (IV). Levitt, for example, has employed instrumental variables regression procedures, using mayoral and gubernatorial election cycles and firefighter hiring as instruments for police strength, to address the potential endogeneity of police levels in structural equations of crime due to simultaneity bias.

Methods

We assess the validity and reliability of the instruments used by Levitt for police hiring using recently-developed specification tests for instruments. We apply these tests to both Levitt’s original panel dataset of 59 US cities covering the period 1970–1992 and an extended version of the panel with data through 2008.

Results

Results indicate that election cycles and firefighter hiring are “weak instruments”—weak predictors of police growth that, if used as instruments in an IV estimation, are prone to result in an unreliable estimate of the impact of police levels on crime.

Conclusions

Levitt’s preferred instruments for police levels—mayoral and gubernatorial election cycles and firefighter hiring—are weak instruments by current econometric standards and thus cannot be used to address the potential endogeneity of police in crime equations.

     

Violent Crime,Residential Instability and Mobility: Does the Relationship Differ in Minority Neighborhoods?

This study examines the reciprocal relationship between violent crime and residential stability in neighborhoods. We test whether the form of stability matters by comparing two different measures of stability: a traditional index of residential stability and a novel approach focusing specifically on the stability of homeowners. We also examine whether the racial/ethnic composition of the neighborhood in which this stability occurs affects the instability—violent crime relationship. To test the simultaneous relationship between residential mobility and crime we estimate a dual multivariate latent curve model of the change in the violent crime rate and the change in the rate of home sales while controlling for neighborhood socioeconomic and demographic characteristics using data from Los Angeles between 1992 and 1997. Results indicate that the initial level of violent crime increases the trajectory of residential instability in subsequent years, whether the instability is measured as homeowner turnover specifically, or based on an index of all residents. However, the effect of instability on violent crime is only apparent when measuring instability based on an index of general residential turnover and not when including the presence of owners in this measure, or when measuring it based on homeowner turnover. We consistently find that stable highly Latino communities exhibit a protective effect against violence.     

Risky Facilities: Crime Radiators or Crime Absorbers? A Comparison of Internal and External Levels of Theft

Objectives

To undertake the first exploration of the nature of the relationship between internal crime (those that happen within facilities) and external crime (those occurring outside but in the nearby locale of facilities). The following questions are addressed. Do those localities that suffer high volumes of crime internally within their facilities also suffer high levels of crime in their immediate external environment? How is this influenced by the distribution of internal theft across facilities? What are the likely mechanisms for any relationship found?

Methods

Spatial regression is used to explore these relationships using data for 30,144 incidents of theft from a Metropolitan area of the UK arranged into small 50 × 50 m grid squares. Variables used in the analysis include counts of external and internal theft, counts of victimized and ‘risky’ facilities, indicators of land-use and a proxy for the on-street population.

Results

There is found to be a strong positive relationship between internal and external theft that appears to be strengthened by the existence of facilities suffering particularly high crime volumes. Results suggest that internal theft problems precede external ones and that the physical concentration of chronically risky facilities is a particularly strong predictor of external theft problems.

Conclusions

An argument is made that risky facilities act as crime ‘radiators’, causing crime in the immediate environment as well as internally. This has implications for crime prevention policy in terms of facility placement and management.     

The Consequences of Social Inequality for the Health and Development of India’s Children: The Case of Caste,Sanitation, and Child Height

Social Justice Research - The links among social inequality, economic inequality, and health have long been of interest to social scientists, but causal links are difficult to investigate...