Seasonal Variation in Violent Victimization: Opportunity and the Annual Rhythm of the School Calendar

Objectives

This study draws on an underused source of data on seasonality—victim surveys—to assess whether violent crime occurs with greater frequency during summer months or whether it simply becomes known to police more often, and to examine the extent to which seasonal patterns in violent crime are differentiated based on victim characteristics and location of crime.

Methods

Data used come from the 1993–2008 National Crime Victimization Survey. Time series regression models are estimated to describe seasonal differences in violent crime victimization and reporting rates.

Results

Seasonal trends in youth violence stand in contrast to the trends for young and older adults, primarily due to their high risk of victimization at and near school. No evidence of seasonality is found in the extent to which serious violence becomes known to the police. However, simple assault is significantly more likely to come to the attention of the police during the summer months, primarily due to increases in the reporting of youth violence.

Conclusions

Our findings confirm some of the previous work on seasonal patterns in violent crime, but also show that these patterns vary across age groups, locations, and type of violence.     

Examining What Makes Violent Crime Victims Unique: Extending Statistical Methods for Studying Specialization to the Analysis of Crime Victims

Objectives

Much victimization research focuses on specific types of crime victims, which implies that the factors responsible for some victimization outcomes are distinct from others. Recent developments in victimization theory, however, take a more general approach, postulating that victimization regardless of type will share a similar basic etiology. This research examines how and whether the risk factors that are associated with violent victimization significantly differ from those that predict nonviolent victimization.

Methods

Using data from 3,682 Kentucky youth, we employ Osgood and Schreck??s (2007) Item Response Theory-based statistical approach for detecting specialization to determine the properties and predictors of tendencies for individuals to fall victim to specific types of crime.

Results

Findings show that victims typically experience varied outcomes, but some victims have a clear tendency toward violent victimization and that it is possible to predict this tendency.

Conclusions

The findings indicate that a more nuanced general approach, one that accounts for tendencies toward specific victimization outcomes, might add insight about the causes of victimization. This research also shows how statistical methods designed to examine offense specialization can add value for research on victimization.     

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.     

“Can’t Stop,Won’t Stop”: Self-Control,Risky Lifestyles,and Repeat Victimization

Objectives

Drawing from lifestyle-routine activity and self-control perspectives, the causal mechanisms responsible for repeat victimization are explored. Specifically, the present study investigates: (1) the extent to which self-control influences the changes victims make to their risky lifestyles following victimization, and (2) whether the failure to make such changes predicts repeat victimization.

Methods

Two waves of panel data from the Gang Resistance Education and Training program are used (N = 1,370) and direct measures of change to various risky lifestyles are included. Two-stage maximum likelihood models are estimated to explore the effects of self-control and changes in risky lifestyles on repeat victimization for a subsample of victims (n = 521).

Results

Self-control significantly influences whether victims make changes to their risky lifestyles post-victimization, and these changes in risky lifestyles determine whether victims are repeatedly victimized. These changes in risky lifestyles are also found to fully mediate the effects of self-control on repeat victimization.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that future research should continue to measure directly the intervening mechanisms between self-control and negative life outcomes, and to conceptualize lifestyles-routine activities as dynamic processes.     

Structural Constraints,Risky Lifestyles,and Repeat Victimization

Objectives

Research indicates that victims who make changes to their risky behavioral routines are better able to avoid being victimized again in the future. Nevertheless, some victims’ abilities to change their behaviors may be limited by what Hindelang et al. in Victims of personal crime: an empirical foundation for a theory of personal victimization. Ballinger, Cambridge (1978) referred to as “structural constraints.” To assess this issue, we determine: (1) whether victims who reside in communities characterized by structural constraints (e.g., concentrated disadvantage) are more likely to continue engaging in risky behaviors (e.g., offending, illicit drug use, and getting drunk) after being victimized; and (2) whether victims who continue to engage in risky lifestyles have an increased likelihood of repeat victimization.

Methods

Ten waves of data (spanning nearly 7 years) from the Pathways to Desistance Study are used, and multilevel models are estimated to examine changes to risky lifestyles and repeat victimization among a subsample of victims.

Results

Findings indicate that community-level structural constraints impose limits on the changes that victims make to their risky lifestyles, and that these changes influence repeat victimization.

Conclusions

We conclude that, in the context of repeat victimization, structural constraints are both real and consequential, and that future theory and research should continue to explore how context shapes and influences victims’ behavioral routines.

     

Violence in Schools: Repeat Victimization,Low Self-Control,and the Mitigating Influence of School Efficacy

Objectives

Examine the distribution of various forms of violent victimization among adolescents in school and the main and interactive effects of low self-control and school efficacy on repeat assault victimization.

Methods

This study used data collected from students and teachers as part of the Rural Substance abuse and Violence Project. We calculated a simple Poisson model of the expected frequencies of adolescents to experience each number of assault, robbery, and weapons victimizations given the total number of each type of victimization reported by the sample. We then tested whether the observed frequencies differed significantly from the expected. Finally, we estimated a series of hierarchical nonlinear models to assess the main and interactive effects of low self-control and school efficacy on repeat assault victimization.

Results

All three forms of violent victimization were non-randomly distributed across students. Low self-control was associated with repeat victimization among assault victims, though this effect was weakened significantly by school efficacy.

Conclusions

Violence in schools is highly concentrated among repeat victims. Efforts to reduce violence in schools should be focused on those who have already been victimized. Schools may be able to limit the effects of low self-control on repeat assault victimization by strengthening school efficacy.

     

A Bi-level Framework for Understanding Prisoner Victimization

Objectives

To present and test an opportunity perspective on prison inmate victimization.

Methods

Stratified random samples of inmates (n ₁ = 5,640) were selected from Ohio and Kentucky prisons (n ₂ = 46). Bi-level models of the prevalence of assaults and thefts were estimated. Predictors included indicators of inmate routines/guardianship, target antagonism, and target vulnerability at the individual level, and several indicators of guardianship at the facility level.

Results

Assaults were more common among inmates with certain routines and characteristics that might have increased their odds of being victimized (e.g., less time spent in recreation; committed violence themselves during incarceration), and higher levels of assaults characterized environments with lower levels of guardianship (e.g., architectural designs with more “blind spots”, larger populations, and less rigorous rule enforcement as perceived by correctional officers). Similar findings emerged for thefts in addition to stronger individual level effects in prisons with weaker guardianship (e.g., ethnic group differences in the risk of theft were greater in facilities with larger populations and less rigorous rule enforcement).

Conclusions

The study produced evidence favoring a bi-level opportunity perspective of inmate victimization, with some unique differences in the relevance of particular concepts between prison and non-prison contexts.     

Individual Differences in the Deterrence Process: Which Individuals Learn (Most) from Their Offending Experiences?

Objectives

To test whether individuals differ in deterrability by studying whether the effect of criminal experiences on perceived detection risk varies by criminal propensity.

Methods

Data from the British “Offending, Crime and Justice Survey”, a four-wave panel study on criminal behavior and victimization, are analyzed. Two subsamples for analyses are constructed: one of non-offenders at first measurement, to analyze the effect of gaining first offending experiences during the time of study (n = 1,279) and one sample of individuals who have committed offenses within the past year (n = 567), to analyze the effect of police contact among active offenders. Fixed-effects regressions of perceived detection risk on criminal experiences and interactions between criminal experiences and measures of criminal propensity (risk-affinity, impulsivity) are estimated.

Results

Analyses support learning models for the formation and change of risk perceptions, but individual differences by criminal propensity are present in the deterrence process: After gaining first offending experiences, impulsive individuals as well as risk-averse individuals are more likely to lower their perceptions about the probability of detection than less impulsive or risk-affine individuals are. A positive effect of police contact on expected detection risk is restricted to risk-averse individuals.

Conclusions

Findings support claims that deterrence works differently for crime-prone individuals. The differential effects of impulsivity and risk-affinity underline the importance of not combining constituent characteristics of criminal propensity in composite indices, because they might have differential effects on deterrence.     

Immigration and Crime in the New Destinations, 2000–2007: A Test of the Disorganizing Effect of Migration

Objectives

Drawing from a social disorganization perspective, this research addresses the effect of immigration on crime within new destinations—places that have experienced significant recent growth in immigration over the last two decades.

Methods

Fixed effects regression analyses are run on a sample of n = 1252 places, including 194 new destinations, for the change in crime from 2000 to the 2005–2007 period. Data are drawn from the 2000 Decennial Census, 2005–2007 American Community Survey, and the Uniform Crime Reports. Places included in the sample had a minimum population of 20,000 as of the 2005-07 ACS. New destinations are defined as places where the foreign-born have increased by 150 % or more since 1990 and with a minimum foreign-born population of 1000 in 2007.

Results

Results indicate new destinations experienced greater declines in crime, relative to the rest of the sample. Moreover, new destinations with greater increases in foreign-born experienced greater declines in their rates of crime. Additional predictors of change in crime include change in socioeconomic disadvantage, the adult-child ratio, and population size.

Conclusions

Results fail to support a disorganization view of the effect of immigration on crime in new destinations and are more in line with the emerging community resource perspective. Limitations and suggestions for future directions are discussed.

     

A Sensitivity Analysis of Egocentric Measures of Peer Delinquency to Latent Homophily: A Research Note

Objectives

Egocentric measures of peer delinquency, obtained through a census of a social network, have become the preferred operationalization for examining the relationships between social influence and delinquency. Studies regressing ego’s delinquency on the delinquency of nominated friend/s (i.e. alter/s) conclude that a statistically significant coefficient provides evidence of social influence. However, the inferences drawn from these studies may be biased by the introduction of artificial statistical dependence as a consequence of using social network data in a regression framework. Recent work (Shalizi and Thomas Sociol Methods Res 40:211–239, 2011) shows that latent homophily, or unmeasured confounding of observables, may lead to nonzero estimates of social influence, even if there is no causal significance. To examine this possibility, sensitivity analyses have been created (e.g. VanderWeele and Arah Epidemiology 22:42–52, 2011; VanderWeele Sociol Methods Res 40:240–255, 2011) to determine the robustness of an estimated coefficient to latent homophily.

Methods

In this research note, I examine the robustness of estimates for social influence from two articles (Haynie Am J Sociol 106:1013–1057, 2001; Meldrum et al. J Res Crime Delinq 46:353–376, 2009) using egocentric measures of peer delinquency.

Results

Findings indicate that for large, precise point estimates, highly improbable conditions are needed to explain away the effects of social influence. However, less precise point estimates (i.e. large standard errors) are more sensitive to latent homophily.

Conclusions

The analyses indicate that studies using egocentric measures should conduct sensitivity tests, particularly when the estimated effect is weak and/or has a relatively large standard error. Scripts written in the free programming language R (R Core Team R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, 2012) are provided for researchers to conduct such analyses.     

Does Spending Time in Public Settings Contribute to the Adolescent Risk of Violent Victimization?

Objectives

Using data from a nationally representative survey of adolescents in Finland this research examined the influence of spending time in public settings on the risk of physical assault and robbery victimization.

Methods

Binary and multinomial regression models were estimated to disaggregate associations between hours spent in public settings and characteristics of the victimization incident. The amount of causality/spuriousness in the association was examined using a method of situational decomposition.

Results

Our findings indicate that: (1) an active night life (any time after 6 pm) has a strong effect on victimization for boys, whereas much of the association between night life and victimization is spurious for girls; (2) after-school activity is not a risk factor; (3) adolescents who frequent public places at night increase their risk of victimization by people they know as well as strangers; and (4) much of the risk of night time activity in public settings is alcohol-related.

Conclusions

Our research suggests that a good deal of the risk associated with spending time in public settings is a function of the victim’s own risky behavior rather than inadvertent physical contact with motivated offenders in the absence of capable guardians. In addition, this lifestyle is significantly more victimogenic for males.     

Why is the Victimization of Young Latino Adults Higher in New Areas of Settlement?

Objectives

We used multilevel data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to identify factors that account for differences in risk of violent victimization among young Latino adults in new and traditional settlement areas.

Methods

Area-identified NCVS data (2008–2012) were linked with census tract data from the decennial census and American Community Survey to study individual and community contributions to the risk of violent victimization. We analyzed total violence and violence specific to offense types and victim-offender relationship. The analyses were performed adjusting for the complex survey design.

Results

Young Latino adults in new settlement areas have higher victimization rates than their counterparts in traditional areas for total violence and for the majority of violence types studied. Holding constant individual and other contextual factors, Latino population density is a key neighborhood characteristic that explains the observed area differences in victimization, yielding evidence for the hypothesis that co-ethnic support in a community helps protect young Latino adults and contributes to differences in victimization across areas. Also there is evidence that the protective role of Latino population density is stronger for violence involving non-strangers than it is for violence involving strangers. Moreover, we find that the concentration of Latino immigrants, which indicates the neighborhood potential for immigrant revitalization, is another neighborhood factor that protects young Latino adults in both new and traditional settlement areas. However, there is some but limited evidence that the neighborhood-revitalizing role of immigration might be smaller in some contexts (such as some new areas outside central cities), possibly because those areas are heterogeneous in their ability to promote the integration of immigrants.

Conclusions

Our analysis of the NCVS shows the importance of neighborhood factors for the risk of violence among young Latino adults. It provides evidence consistent with co-ethnic support and immigrant revitalization theories. The findings also suggest that the effects of those neighborhood factors may be contingent upon violence type and the context in which they occur. These findings help us understand the difference in the safety of young Latino adults in new and traditional areas.

     

Uncovering the Pathways Between Gang Membership and Violent Victimization

Objectives

Gang members are more likely to be victimized violently than non-gang youth, but the extent to which this relationship is confounded, direct, or mediated remains unclear. This study responds to recent calls by scholars for more methodologically sound research in this area with the goal of uncovering the pathways between gang membership and violent victimization.

Methods

Using a school-based longitudinal sample of adolescents, the current study uses Preacher and Hayes multiple mediator structural equation modeling and counterfactual methodology to test whether and which theoretical pathways—self-control, cultural orientations, routine activity, and lifestyle theory—mediate the contemporaneous and prospective effects of gang membership on violent victimization.

Results

The results indicate that 27 % of the contemporaneous effects of gang membership on victimization is attributable to selection, with the remaining 73 % endogenous to gang membership, supporting Thornberry et al.’s (J Res Crime Delinquency 30:55–87, 1993) enhancement model. Entry into a gang increases risk taking, temper, self-centeredness, negative peer commitment, neutralization of violence, aggressive conflict resolution, unstructured socializing, and delinquency, and decreases empathy and positive peer commitment. The contemporaneous gang membership-victimization link was fully mediated, due almost entirely to delinquency. Prospective models reveal a gang membership-victimization link that is fully confounded by selection, although attrition and desistance from gangs may be responsible for this finding.

Conclusions

The existing risky attitudes and behaviors of youth who select into gangs matters a great deal for understanding the gang membership-victimization link, but these very risks are exacerbated upon entry into a gang. Our mediation findings suggest that interventions targeting highly delinquent gang members should pay dual dividends of reducing delinquency and victimization.

     

Scaling Criminal Offending

Objective:

This paper reviews a century of research on creating theoretically meaningful and empirically useful scales of criminal offending and illustrates their strengths and weaknesses.

Methods:

The history of scaling criminal offending is traced in a detailed literature review focusing on the issues of seriousness, unidimensionality, frequency, and additivity of offending. Modern practice in scaling criminal offending is measured using a survey of 130 articles published in five leading criminology journals over a two-year period that included a scale of individual offending as either an independent or dependent variable. Six scaling methods commonly used in contemporary criminological research are demonstrated and assessed using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: dichotomous, frequency, weighted frequency, variety, summed category, and item response theory ??theta??.

Results:

The discipline of criminology has seen numerous scaling techniques introduced and forgotten. While no clearly superior method dominates the field today, the most commonly used scaling techniques are dichotomous and frequency scales, both of which are fraught with methodological pitfalls including sensitivity to the least serious offenses.

Conclusions:

Variety scales are the preferred criminal offending scale because they are relatively easy to construct, possess high reliability and validity, and are not compromised by high frequency non-serious crime types.     

Understanding the Role of Repeat Victims in the Production of Annual US Victimization Rates

Victimization incidence rates produced from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) are a generally accepted annual indicator of the amount and type of crime in the United States. However, persons who report a large number of similar victimizations—known as series victimizations in the NCVS—are currently excluded in government reports of annual violent victimizations. This paper quantifies the effect of series incident counting procedures on national estimates of violent victimization. The findings suggest that these high-volume repeat victims can have a significant impact on the magnitude and distribution of violent victimization. Current government counting rules that exclude series incidents do not include about three out of every five violent victimizations and distorts the characterization and risk of violence in the United States. However, the inclusion of series incidents introduces significant estimate instability. One remedy is to use prevalence rates in concert with incidence rates to present a more complete and reliable picture of victimization.

The Distribution of Household Property Crimes

Previous studies have established that repeat victimizations occur more frequently than would be expected if households within a particular area were victimized randomly. This implies that characteristics of the household affect the victimization rate. Even controlling for these characteristics, we find that a Poisson model does not capture the distribution of victimizations because repeat victimizations are more concentrated than it would indicate. This leads us to adopt the negative binomial generalization of the Poisson model. Our analysis uses sociodemographic attributes of the household and community-level characteristics to predict victimizations, with the victimization data being the observed number of property crime victimizations from the 1992 British Crime Survey. The negative binomial generalization is found to be highly statistically significant and the crime concentration it implies becomes much more marked as the predicted number of victimizations increases.     

Measuring the Distribution of Crime and Its Concentration

Objectives

Generally speaking, crime is, fortunately, a rare event. As far as modelling is concerned, this sparsity of data means that traditional measures to quantify concentration are not appropriate when applied to crime suffered by a population. Our objective is to develop a new technique to measure the concentration of crime which takes into account its low frequency of occurrence and its high degree of concentration in such a way that this measure is comparable over time and over different populations.

Methods

This article derives an estimate of the distribution of crime suffered by a population based on a mixture model and then evaluates a new and standardised measurement of the concentration of the rates of suffering a crime based on that distribution.

Results

The new measure is successfully applied to the incidence of robbery of a person in Mexico and is able to correctly quantify the concentration crime in such a way that is comparable between different regions and can be tracked over different time periods.

Conclusions

The risk of suffering a crime is not uniformly distributed across a population. There are certain groups which are statistically immune to suffering crime but there are also groups which suffer chronic victimisation. This measure improves our understanding of how patterns of crime can be quantified allowing us to determine if a prevention policy results in a crime reduction rather than target displacement. The method may have applications beyond crime science.

     

The Crime Kuznets Curve

Objectives

Criminologists have long studied the relationship between economic conditions and crime. Empirical evidence is inconclusive, pointing at different directions. This may reflect the conflicting theoretical predictions on the relationship between these phenomena, but also the prevailing methodological choice which focuses on linear relationships even though nonlinearities are plausible theoretically.

Methods

In this paper, we revisit the empirical relationship between economic conditions and crime by exploring potential nonlinearities. We look at flexible parametric specifications that include up to a cubic term of per capita income (or one dummy for each income quintile) and nonparametric and semi-parametric specifications (such as General Additive Models). Our results are robust to controlling for the standard socioeconomic, demographic, and policy determinants of crime, as well as to including a lagged dependent variable or state and time fixed effects.

Results

We document the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between crime and income within US states for the period 1970-2011. Crime increases with per capita income until it reaches a maximum, and then decreases as income keeps rising. This “Crime Kuznets Curve” (CKC) exists for property crime and for categories of violent crime that can be related to economic appropriation, like robbery, and is less robust for violent crimes not connected to economic incentives. We show that this pattern cannot be explained by correlated changes in economic inequality or by changes in law enforcement.

Conclusions

In addition to providing robust evidence of the existence of a CKC, our findings lay the groundwork for studies exploring the underlying theoretical mechanisms. These should go beyond income inequality or law enforcement, and should explain why the results hold more clearly for property than for violent crime. Our findings and subsequent research to understand the underlying drivers are relevant for policy, as they suggest that violent conflict cannot be tackled solely by the trickle-down forces of economic growth.

     

“Soft” policing at hot spots—do police community support officers work? A randomized controlled trial

Objectives

To determine whether crime-reduction effects of increased police patrols in hot spots are dependent on the “hard” threat of immediate physical arrest, or whether “soft” patrols by civilian (but uniformed) police staff with few arrest powers and no weapons can also reduce crime. We also sought to assess whether the number of discrete patrol visits to a hot spot was more or less important than the total minutes of police presence across all visits, and whether effects based on counts of crime would be consistent with effects on a Crime Harm Index outcome.

Methods

We randomly assigned 72 hot spots into 34 treatment units and 38 controls. Treatment consisted of increases in foot patrol by uniformed, unarmed, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) who carry no weapons and hold few arrest powers beyond those of ordinary citizens. GPS-trackers on every PCSO and Constable in the city yielded precise measurements of all patrol time in all hot spots. Standardized mean differences (Cohen’s d), OLS regression model, and Weighted Displacement Quotient are used to assess main effects, to model the interaction effect of GPS data with treatment, and to measure the diffusion-of-benefits of the intervention, respectively. Outcomes included counts of incidents as well as the Cambridge Crime Harm Index.

Results

As intended, patrol visits and minutes by Police Constables were equal across the treatment and control groups. The sole difference in policing between the treatments groups was in visits to the hot spots by PCSOs, in both the mean daily frequency of discrete visits (T?=?4.65, C?=?2.66; p?≤?.001) and total minutes across all visits (T?=?37.41, C?=?15.92; p?≤?.001), approximately two more ten-minute visits per day in treatment than in control. Main effect estimates suggest 39 % less crime by difference-in-difference analysis of reported crimes compared to control conditions, and 20 % reductions in emergency calls-for-service compared to controls. Crime in surrounding areas showed a diffusion of benefits rather than displacement for treatment hot spots compared to controls. A “Reiss’s Reward” effect was observed, with more proactive patrols predicting less crime across treatment hot spots, while more reactive PCSO time predicted more crime across control hot spots. Crime Harm Index estimates of the seriousness value of crime prevented ranged from 85 to 360 potential days of imprisonment in each treatment group hot spot (relative to controls) by a mean difference of 21 more minutes of PCSO patrol per day, for a potential return on investment of up to 26 to 1.

Conclusions

A crime reduction effect of extra patrols in hot spots is not conditional on “hard” police power. Even small differences in foot patrols showing the “soft power” of unarmed paraprofessionals, holding constant vehicular patrols by Police Constables, were causally linked to both lower counts of crimes and a substantially lower crime harm index score. Correlational evidence within the treatment group suggests that greater frequency of discrete PCSO visits may yield more crime reduction benefit than greater duration of those visits, but RCTs are needed for better evidence on this crucial issue.