FIREARMS OWNERSHIP, GUN CONTROL ATTITUDES, AND NEIGHBORHOOD ENVIRONMENT

Consensus has not been reached on whether a relationsip exists among violent crime, fear of crime, and firearms ownership. The questions addressed here are how, if at all, the neighborhood environments of urban blacks and whites affect their patterns and levels of gun ownership, what their attitudes are toward gun regulation, and whether there is a relationship between gun regulation attitudes and firearms ownership. Data collected through a mail questionnaire from white and black residents of high and low homicide risk neighborhoods in Detroit were used to test the questions. Results indicate, for the most part, that blacks and whites hold different attitudes toward gun regulation, that gun regulation attitudes affect gun ownership patterns, and that only in one instance did neighborhood environment explain gun ownership relatively well.     

STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS AND RACIAL HOMICIDE PATTERNS: A LOOK AT THE MULTIPLE DISADVANTAGES IN URBAN AREAS*

This research examines the differential effects of structural conditions on race-specific victim and offender homicide rates in large U.S. cities in 1990. While structural theories of race relations and criminological explanations are reviewed, particular attention is given to those structural theories that highlight racial competition, economic and labor market opportunity, and racial segregation as essential for an examination of racially disaggregated homicide offending. The effects of these and other structural conditions are estimated for four racially distinct homicide offending models—black intraracial, white intraracial, black interracial, and white interracial homicides. The results suggest that the structural conditions that lead to race-specific victim and offender homicide rates differ significantly among the four models. Economic deprivation and local opportunity structures are found to influence significantly the rates of intraracial homicide offending, while racial inequality contributes solely to black interracial homicide rates. In addition, our findings indicate that blacks and whites face different economic and social realities related to economic deprivation and social isolation. The differential impact of these structural conditions and other labor market factors are discussed.     

The wild (white) ones: comparing frames of white and black deviance

In this case study, I establish how a racial privilege shields whites from being framed as deviant by using two racially segregated motorcycle rallies as a naturalistic experiment. I conduct a content analysis of reader posts to online newspaper stories about the biker events (which regularly include deviance) and discover the bikers, their behaviors, and the proposed community reactions are framed in nearly opposite ways. Posters attribute a ‘white innocence’ to white bikers, framing them as upper class exemplars of American Individualism who temporarily suspend their morality during the rally by drinking, exposing their nude bodies, and ignoring newly passed laws, banning loud mufflers, and requiring helmets. Posters claim these unpleasant, although non-dangerous forms of deviance can be ignored, overlooked, and even celebrated as defiant acts against authority. The white innocence can appear racially innocuous until compared to the perception of black bikers who engage in similar behaviors at their rally but are framed as underclass criminals who attend the rally to steal and murder. This reveals how a usually unseen privilege shields whites from entanglements with the criminal justice system, as posters also call for further policing of racial minorities.     

A MULTILEVEL TEST OF RACIAL THREAT THEORY

We develop a conceptual model articulating the mechanisms by which racial threat is theorized to affect social control, focusing specifically on the influence of the relative size of the black population on the likelihood that the police will arrest a black citizen suspected of a violent criminal offense. A multilevel analysis of 145, 255 violent crimes reported to police in 182 cities during 2000 shows only qualified support for racial threat theory. Controlling for the amount of race-specific crime reported to police, our findings reveal that black citizens actually have a lower probability of arrest in cities with a relatively large black population. This finding tends to cast doubt on the validity of the racial threat hypothesis. No evidence buttresses the claim that economic competition between whites and blacks affects arrest probabilities. However, results show that in cities where racial segregation is more pronounced blacks have a reduced risk sof being arrested relative to whites. Crimes involving black offenders and white victims are also more apt to result in an arrest in cities that are racially segregated. These findings support the view that racial segregation is an informal mechanism to circumscribe the threat of potentially volatile subordinate populations.     

Running on Fear: Immigration,Race and Crime Framings in Contemporary GOP Presidential Debate Discourse

This analysis explores the use of “race-baiting,” known herein as “racially divisive appeals” (RDAs), and crime frames in Republican (GOP) presidential debate discourse during the 2008 and subsequent election cycles. RDAs which mobilize images of minorities as criminals, terrorists, or as populations engaged in voter or welfare fraud, are analyzed. While the strategic exploitation of racial animus in American politics has tended to be associated with the “Southern Strategy,” wherein GOP politicians wooed southern whites by fueling anxieties about blacks, this research finds that modern RDAs focus more on appealing to fears about immigrants. Reasons for this shift, as well some of the varied discursive techniques and narrative content of contemporary RDAs, are explored.     

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.     

Reassessing the Association between Gun Availability and Homicide at the Cross-National Level

This paper had two objectives. First, to examine the association between gun availability, gun homicide, and homicide in a manner that better accounts for potential simultaneity than previous cross-national research. Second, to examine the manner that the relationship between gun availability and violence is shaped by socio-historical and cultural context. The results lend little support to the notion that gun availability operates uniformly across nations to influence levels of violence. Rather, these results suggest that the nature of the relationship between gun availability and violence is shaped by the socio-historical and cultural processes occurring across nations.     

A quota jury: affirmative action in jury selection

It is not too naive to believe that the use of affirmative action policies in the jury selection for the Rodney King beating trial of White police officers would have prevented the uprisings that followed their acquittal. The public outrage and riots that followed the verdict demonstrated the need for affirmative inclusion of racial minorities on jury trials to preserve and restore the public’s confidence and legitimacy of verdicts in racially motivated cases. While racially mixed juries offer many benefits, current jury selection procedures fail to provide much protection to members of racial minorities in criminal trials. From the source list to the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges, the current selection procedures provide almost no protection to racial minorities. The issue of preferential treatments of racial minorities in education, employment, and business has divided the nation and even some minority communities themselves. Affirmative action in jury proceedings and trials, however, has yet to receive much deserved attention and critical scrutiny. This article empirically examines public perceptions of possible applications of affirmative action mechanisms in criminal jury proceedings, focusing on the uses of mandatory racial quotas to engineer racially integrated juries in criminal trials. Three different types of racially mixed juries—the jury “de medietate linguae,” the Hennepin jury model, and the social science model—are examined, and the public’s perceptions of affirmative mechanisms ensuring minority participation on juries are analyzed. This article argues that the affirmative mechanism to secure racially mixed juries is essential to both the appearance and substance of fairness in criminal jury proceedings, and both the Hennepin model and the social science model are overwhelmingly supported as the ideal types of affirmative jury structures in creating racially heterogeneous juries.     

Guns,Southernness, and gun control

Southerners have been found to have higher levels of gun ownership than persons who reside elsewhere. This may be due to cultural factors peculiar to the Southern region. If so, this would have interesting implications for gun control initiatives. Although the differential in gun ownership has been linked to varying support or opposition to gun control, the relationship between this variable and specific types of gun control has not been examined. With this in mind, we investigate how specific types of gun ownership interact with Southernness, controlling for the effects of other variables, to determine preferences for three different types of gun control. We use 1975 data collected by DMI on a stratified random sample of 1538 noninstitutionalized adults in the United States. An analysis of several logistic regression equations indicates that a cultural component, related to Southernness, affects attitudes toward gun control. Southerners, in general, were the most opposed to permits and handgun bans. Southern shotgun owners, in particular, were found to be the most opposed to gun registration. These findings point to the need to consider region, culture, and gun type when addressing the issue of gun control.We would be happy to supply the interested reader with an electronic copy of the data set.     

The impact of gun control and gun ownership levels on violence rates

What effects do gun control restrictions and gun prevalence have on rates of violence and crime? Data were gathered for all 170 U.S. cities with a 1980 population of at least 100,000. The cities were coded for the presence of 19 major categories of firearms restriction, including both state- and city-level restrictions. Multiple indirect indicators of gun prevalence levels were measured and models of city violence rates were estimated using two-stage least-squares methods. The models covered all major categories of intentional violence and crime which frequently involve guns: homicide, suicide, fatal gun accidents, robbery, and aggravated assaults, as well as rape. Findings indicate that (1) gun prevalence levels generally have no net positive effect on total violence rates, (2) homicide, gun assault, and rape rates increase gun prevalence, (3) gun control restrictions have no net effect on gun prevalence levels, and (4) most gun control restrictions generally have no net effect on violence rates. There were, however, some possible exceptions to this last conclusion—of 108 assessments of effects of different gun laws on different types of violence, 7 indicated good support, and another 11 partial support, for the hypothesis of gun control efficacy.     

DOES GUN PREVALENCE AFFECT TEEN GUN CARRYING AFTER ALL?*

Previous research suggests that American adolescents usually have ready access to guns, and that the extent of misuse of guns by adolescents is not much affected by local gun prevalence or regulation. This “futility” claim is based on one interpretation of survey data from several cities, but has not been tested directly. Here we do so using microdata from a nationally representative survey, the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males. Using the restricted geo‐coded version of these data, and conditioning on an extensive set of covariates, we find (among other results) that the likelihood of gun carrying increases markedly with the prevalence of gun ownership in the given community. We also analyze the propensity to carry other types of weapons, finding that it is unrelated to the local prevalence of gun ownership. The prevalence of youths carrying both guns and other weapons is positively related to the local rate of youth violence (as measured by the robbery rate), confirmatory evidence that weapons carrying by youths is motivated in part by self‐protection.     

GUN CONTROL LEGISLATION: Impact and Ideology

This analysis attempts to measure the impact of state laws upon the rates of gun violence. While controlling for several standard social phenomena and using two different statistical techniques, it appears that laws governing the use of handguns in the various states have little effect on the rates of gun crime. It is suggested that the possible reason for such ineffectiveness is not necessasrily the nature of the solutions (laws), but rather the misunderstanding of the problem (gun violence) by policy implementers.     

Metric assessment of race from the pelvis in South Africans

It is well known that there are measurable differences between whites and blacks in the size and proportions of skeletal components. There are also metric differences among populations within these racial phenotypes. The population specific quantification of this variation can be used to aid in the identification of racial affinity in the absence of a more racially definitive skeletal element like the skull. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to quantify these differences in the pelvis of South African whites and blacks. A sample of 400, ostensibly healthy known sex/race os coxae was examined. Skeletal material was obtained from the Pretoria and Dart collections. A series of 13 measurements were taken Data were subjected to SPSS stepwise and direct discriminant function analysis. Pubic length was chosen as best for discriminating between races for males and iliac breadth as best in females. Highest average accuracies (Function 1) were 88% for males (pubic length, greater sciatic notch posterior width, acetabulum diameter, total height) and 85% for females (pubic length, greater sciatic notch posterior width, acetabulum diameter, iliac breath). In conclusion, this research resulted in the development of standards of identification tailored to this population and unquestionably demonstrates that race differences in the skeleton are highly significant and must be considered in all skeletal analyses.     

Minority threat and punishment: A cross-national analysis

There has been considerable recent interest in understanding how changes within the racial and ethnic landscape contribute to both the increased segregation of minority populations and their punishment. The minority group-threat hypothesis proposes that punishment is one outcome of the regulation of groups that are racially, culturally, or ethnically different. This study examined the relationship between population heterogeneity and the use of punishment, measured in terms of abolition of the death penalty and imprisonment rates in 140 nations. Controlling for modernization, political repression, violent crime, and economic stress, the findings indicate that population heterogeneity was positively associated with imprisonment. Likewise, lesser diversity was associated with the abolition of capital punishment. Our results suggest that definitions of minority threat be expanded to include indicators of language and religion as well as race and ethnicity.     

THE IMPACT OF RACIALLY INCLUSIVE SCHOOLING ON ADULT INCARCERATION RATES AMONG U.S. COHORTS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS AND WHITES SINCE 1930*

Despite the substantial body of research on the psychological and social effects of racial segregation in schools on African Americans, few studies have considered the possibility that more racially inclusive schools might reduce the risk of extremely negative adult life experiences such as incarceration. Yet such a connection is made plausible by research linking black racial isolation in schools to variables that are often associated with incarceration rates, including concentrated poverty, and low educational and occupational aspirations and attainment. In this paper, we apply methods first developed by labor economists to assess the impact of racial inclusiveness in schools on individual incarceration rates for 5‐year cohorts of African Americans and whites born since 1930. We find strong support for the conclusion that blacks educated in states where a higher proportion of their classmates were white experienced significantly lower incarceration rates as adults. Moreover, our analysis suggests that the effects of racial inclusiveness on black incarceration rates have grown stronger over time. These longitudinal effects are consistent with the argument that the educational climate of predominantly black schools has deteriorated in more recent decades.     

Neighborhood climates of legal cynicism and complaints about abuse of police power†

Research findings show that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which skepticism about laws, the legal system, and police is expressed—is important in understanding neighborhood variation in engagement with the police, particularly in racially isolated African American communities. We argue that legal cynicism is also useful for understanding neighborhood variation in complaints about police misconduct. Using data on complaints filed in Chicago between 2012 and 2014, we show that grievances disproportionately came from racially segregated neighborhoods and that a measure of legal cynicism from the mid-1990s predicts complaints about abuse of police power two decades later. The association between legal cynicism and complaints is net of prior complaints, reported crime, imprisonment, and other structural factors that contribute to the frequency and nature of interactions involving police and residents. Legal cynicism also mediates the influence of racially isolated neighborhoods on complaints. The mid-1990s is the approximate midpoint of a half-century of police scandals in Chicago. Our research findings suggest that contemporary complaints about police misconduct in highly segregated Chicago neighborhoods are grounded in collectively shared historical memories of police malfeasance. They also suggest that persistent complaints about police misconduct may represent officially memorialized expressions of enduring racial protest against police abuse of power.     

RACIALLY HOMOPHILOUS SOCIAL TIES AND INFORMAL SOCIAL CONTROL

Social disorganization theory argues that racial/ethnic heterogeneity is a key neighborhood characteristic leading to social disorganization and, consequently, higher levels of crime. Heterogeneity's effect is argued to be a result of its fragmentation of social ties along racial/ethnic lines, which creates racially homophilous social networks with few ties bridging racial/ethnic groups. Most studies of social ties in social disorganization models, however, have examined their quantity and left unaddressed the extent to which ties are within or across different racial groups. This study goes beyond previous studies by examining the effects of both racially homophilous and interracial friendship networks on informal social control. Using multilevel models and data from 66 neighborhoods with approximately 2,300 respondents, we found that heterogeneity actually increased the average percentage of residents with interracial friendship networks, but the percentage of residents with interracial networks decreased the likelihood of informal social control. In contrast, the percentage of residents with White racially homophilous networks increased the likelihood of informal social control. Examining the microcontext of individuals’ networks, however, we found residents with interracial ties reported higher likelihoods of informal social control and that this effect was enhanced in neighborhoods with higher percentages of non‐White racially homophilous networks.     

An Empirical Analysis of 30 Years of U.S. Juvenile and Adult Sexual Homicide Offender Data: Race and Age Differences in the Victim–Offender Relationship

Abstract: Little is known about the racial patterns of crimes committed by sexual homicide offenders (SHOs). This study examined race and age influences on victim–offender relationship for juvenile and adult SHOs. A large sample (N = 3868) from the Supplemental Homicide Reports (1976–2005) was used. Analyses of victim–offender patterns included examining victim age effects (child, adolescent, adult, and elderly). The findings revealed several race‐ and age‐based differences. Black offenders were significantly overrepresented in the SHO population. This finding held for juveniles and adults independently. White SHOs were highly likely to kill within their race, “intra‐racially” (range 91–100%) across four victim age categories, whereas Black SHOs killed both intra‐racially (range 24–82%) and inter‐racially (18–76%), with the likelihood of their killing inter‐racially increasing as the age of the victim increased. This study underscores the importance of considering victim–offender racial patterns in sexual murder investigations, and it offers practical implications for offender profiling.     

Prior problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in school suspensions

Purpose

A large body of empirical research finds a significant racial gap in the use of exclusionary school discipline with black students punished at rates disproportionate to whites. Furthermore, no variable or set of variables have yet to account for this discrepancy, inviting speculation that this association is caused by racial bias or racial antipathy. We investigate this link and the possibility that differential behavior may play a role.

Methods

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class (ECLS-K), the largest sample of school-aged children in the United States, we first replicate the results of prior studies. We then estimate a second model controlling for prior problem behavior.

Results

Replicating prior studies, we first show a clear racial gap between black and white students in suspensions. However, in subsequent analyses the racial gap in suspensions was completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student – a finding never before reported in the literature.

Conclusions

These findings highlight the importance of early problem behaviors and suggest that the use of suspensions by teachers and administrators may not have been as racially biased as some scholars have argued.