Spatializing the Social Networks of Gangs to Explore Patterns of Violence

The majority of spatial studies of crime employ an inductive approach in both the modeling and interpretation of the mechanisms of influence thought to be responsible for the patterning of crime in space and time. In such studies, the spatial weights matrix is specified without regard to the theorized mechanisms of influence between the units of analysis. Recently, a more deductive approach has begun to gain traction in which the theory of influence is used to model influence in geographic space. Using data from Los Angeles, we model the spatial distribution of gang violence by considering both the relative location of the gangs in space while simultaneously capturing their position within an enmity network of gang rivalries. We find that the spatial distribution of gang violence is more strongly associated with the socio-spatial dimensions of gang rivalries than it is with adjacency-based measures of spatial autocorrelation.