Understanding Crime Trends Workshop Report (2008) / Chapter Skim
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4 Crime and Neighborhood Change--Jeffrey Fagan
4 Crime and Neighborhood Change--Jeffrey Fagan
Pages 81-126
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From page 81... ...
Next the chapter identifies challenges in theory, measurement, and analysis that affect estimates of why and how neighborhood crime rates change, including size and definition of spatial units, mutual and reciprocal relations between units, the endogeneity of criminal justice enforcement and neighborhood ecology, the influences of macro-changes (i.e., the political economy of cities) on local crime rates, constraints of observational and administrative data, theoretical specifications of neighborhood and measurement and analytic strategies.
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From page 82... ...
Shaw and McKay (1943) , for example, showed that crime rates were predictably higher in socially disorganized communities, independent of the residents of those areas.
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From page 83... ...
examined crime rates in Philadelphia neighborhoods to show how neighborhood change, including gentrification, increased both relative deprivation in stable but poor areas and created new crime opportunities that raised the risks of crime in the improving adjacent ones. Schwartz (1999)
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From page 84... ...
CRIME AND NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE Interest in neighborhood change as a predictor of changing crime rates can be traced to the Chicago School traditions of studying "natural social areas" whose identities are the products of complex social and economic factors, sometimes endogeneous (Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, 1925) and sometimes imposed from the outside by political economic dynamics (Logan and Molotch, 1988; Suttles, 1970)
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From page 85... ...
Heitgerd and Bursik (1987) also examined neighborhood change from 1960-1970 and analyzed juvenile court referrals to show that even stable, hanges signaling neighborhood deterioration and rising crime rates include a shift from C single to multiple-family dwellings, as well as increases in residential mobility, unrelated individuals and broken families, the ratio of children to adults, minority group populations, women in the labor force, and nonwhite and Spanish-surname population with advanced education, structural domains long associated with social area theories of crime.
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From page 86... ...
identified correlates of neighborhood crime rates in each decade from 1940 to 1970. The sharp change in correlates in 1950 suggested an ecological shift that was linked to a turning point in neighborhoods' crime rates.
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From page 87... ...
Yet crime trends usually don't cooperate with the attributes and characteristics of the decennial censuses. Crime trends can be quite volatile within a decade or even span decades, and inferences about changes in crime rates at a decade apart can be quite misleading (see, for example, Fagan and Davies, 2004, and Fagan, Davies, and Holland, 2007, on the roller coaster of crime rates in New York from the early 1980s through 2000)
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From page 88... ...
And little is known about whether the pace of changes in neighborhoods itself can influence crime rates. So conceptualizing and measuring neighborhood change on these putative predictors of neighborhood crime trends also raise research challenges.
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From page 89... ...
were interested in street segments because of their concern for identifying the "hot spots" of crime and the prevention potential for focusing limited legal resources on places where crime risks are highest. Other studies also are concerned with the effects of policing on crime trends but use larger spatial aggregations, such as police precincts in New York (Fagan, West, and Holland, 2003; Corman and Mocan, 2000; Rosenfeld, Fornango, and Rengifo, 2007)
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From page 90... ...
examined the effects of policing p olicies -- order maintenance policing, drug enforcement -- on crime rates in New York's 75 police precincts. These precincts are large, with an average population of over 110,000 persons in 2000, and variable in size (standard deviation = 50,194)
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From page 91... ...
These aggregations of multiple neighborhoods in police districts raise risks of identification p roblems -- if crime trends are a function of local social area or neighborhood effects (crime markets, population concentrations) , these smaller area effects may be masked when heterogeneous, multineighborhood police districts or precincts are the unit of analysis.
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From page 92... ...
Defining and Bounding Neighborhoods The definition of "neighborhood" and the articulation of its spatial size and boundaries affect our estimates of crime trends. Definitions of neighborhood in sociology, geography, and criminology have varied over time, in part reflecting the process of development of the city itself.
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From page 93... ...
At times, externalities imposed change, through the construction of public housing (Marcuse, 1995) , or the replacement of slums with other housing reforms (Harcourt, 2005)
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From page 94... ...
0.00 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Year FIGURE 4-2a Trajectory models for homicides in New York City neighborhoods (N = 292)
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From page 95... ...
Homicides per 10,000 0.20 0.10 Group 1 - 725 Tracts (37.4%) 0.00 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 Year FIGURE 4-2b Trajectory models for homicides in New York City census tracts (N = 2,217)
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From page 96... ...
In addition to internal changes, concurrent changes in adjacent but administratively distinct areas could create social and economic ties that span those older boundaries and create cross-boundary social interactions or markets that complicate neighborhood analyses. So, a person's local environment may be influenced more by nearby locations that span administrative boundaries than by more distant locations in the
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From page 97... ...
. The difficulties of attributing in part or whole neighborhood effects equally to all three persons in Tract A or all three in Tract C are obvious.
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From page 98... ...
Grannis's model produced good similarity in the boundaries drawn by the different individuals in the same areas and was especially efficient in explaining neighbors' efforts at social control. Which, then, matters more: the perceived local environment, which may vary across developmental phases and particular social or economic contexts, or the structured environment, in which individuals cognitively
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From page 99... ...
Because physical characteristics also are important features of neighborhood, direct measurement requires multiple methods, including social observation and interviews with residents. But the potential advantages of this strategy for understanding local crime trends and other social and institutional processes make a strong case for its importance as an alternative to the artificiality of current spatial thinking that often is a prisoner of arcane and incompatible administrative boundaries.
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From page 100... ...
and that change need not be taken into account to understand crime trends. That may be true for larger aggregates, such as police precincts or zip codes, perhaps because those aggregates are compositionally heterogeneous and smaller group-specific or small-area changes are hidden.
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From page 101... ...
A good starting point is to assume that the factors that typically explain neighborhood effects statically also will exert influences on crime rates as both crime and neighborhoods change. While the candidates are as broad as the literature on neighborhoods, one can identify three broad categories or domains of effects: social interactional mechanisms, political economy and institutional forces, and legal interventions.
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From page 102... ...
linked changes in housing prices with changes in violent crime rates in New York; they show that in police precincts, declining crime rates through the 1990s stimulated a housing boom and increases in housing values. Fagan and Davies (2007)
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From page 103... ...
and compared it with crime rates in the subboros. Figure 4-4 shows a strong decline in crime, with the sharpest decline taking place in the most disorderly neighborhoods (in terciles)
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From page 104... ...
and felony violent crime rate per 10,000 persons, New York City subboros (N = 55)
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From page 105... ...
In some cases, immigrants can increase risks of crime, as in the case of Washington Heights, discussed earlier. But there also is evidence from several cities, including Chicago, New York, Miami, and others, that the arrival of immigrants is associated with lower crime rates (Fagan and Davies, 2006; Martinez, 2002; Papachristos et al., 2007)
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From page 106... ...
Court-ordered desegregation of public housing in Chicago, for example, created the methodological conditions to test a different question: What are the effects on neighborhoods of moving disadvantaged persons living in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates to places that are more integrated, where poverty rates are lower and far less concentrated, and where schools and work opportunities are improved? These experiments and quasi-experiments produced inconsistent findings about the effects of such moves on individual families and on the neighborhoods to which they moved.
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From page 107... ...
Spatial dependence is not a factor, since most of these studies use larger spatial aggregates -- such as police precincts -- for which spatial dependence may be less influential on crime rates. The analyses may include fixed effects for both neighborhood units and time to isolate the effects of the policing or other legal variables.
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From page 108... ...
These structural characteristics of policing, with the accompanying process dimensions, and the reactions of citizens are another type of neighborhood social interaction that is central to understanding neighborhood effects. Research has yet to capture these effects in panel designs to allow for tests over time of how changes in policing styles affect neighborhoods and crime.
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From page 109... ...
demonstrates a useful approach to resolving the problems of selection bias, confounding, unobserved heterogeneity, and omitted variable bias that complicate the estimation of neighborhood effects. Using a counterfactual causal framework based on propensity score matching and sensitivity analysis, he addresses the inherent endogeneity of adolescent development and neighborhood (see also MacDonald et al., 2007, on neighborhood contexts and citizen evaluations of police)
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From page 110... ...
But it is exactly that interference that may be the mechanism through which neighborhood acts (Sobel, 2006b) , in turn making it inherently difficult to estimate neighborhood effects.
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From page 111... ...
Second, compositional neighborhood data lack information on the neighborhood processes that connect structure to the moving parts of theory. For example, while many studies show a strong correlation between neighborhood poverty rates and crime, they rarely analyze data about the moving parts of a causal model of neighborhood effects to identify the mechanisms through which poverty influences neighborhood life: skewed n contrast, a very simple regression model for a properly implemented randomized experi I ment may not fit the data very well, but it is far more likely to produce unbiased estimates (Berk et al., 2005)
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From page 112... ...
and administrative data to measure the types of densities and proximities to local institutions and networks that comprise the dynamic component of neighborhood effects. This would be a resource-intensive effort: the data must be collected by researchers themselves through interviews or direct observation (Pebley and Sastry, 2006; Sampson and Raudenbush, 1999)
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From page 113... ...
Theoretical and research attention on neighborhoods has been tied to broader interests in understanding how social influences contribute, either directly or in conjunction with individual influences, to the causes and control of crime. Interest in neighborhood influences transcends particular subareas in the study of crime, with important contributions to the study of crime causation or motivation, mechanisms of formal and informal social control, and now, at the conclusion of a full epidemic cycle of rising and falling violent crime rates, its influence on long-term temporal crime trends.
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From page 114... ...
Understanding the leverage that neighborhoods have over crime rates is an important part of understanding both crime trends and neighborhood ecology. Second, what are the causal paths?
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From page 115... ...
In other words, what is it, when crime rates decline, that maintains the social order of neighborhoods, leaving the same ones vulnerable to crime epidemics in subsequent eras? The final set of questions addresses the policy levers that induce neighborhood change in a way that can influence crime trends.
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From page 116... ...
For example, neighborhood studies are likely to rely on observational data that often is deidentified to reduce risks from accidental disclosure. But privacy concerns may arise in the study of the social organization of neighborhoods and networks in them.
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From page 117... ...
. A useful example of a dataset design that addresses both individual and neighborhood change is the Program in Human Development in C hicago Neighborhoods, in which the sampling design explicitly anticipates a nalyses of both individuals and neighborhood effects as well as their multi level or hierarchical effects (Raudenbush and Sampson, 1999; Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, 1997)
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From page 118... ...
Crime data in particular may be a political question; there are risks in transparency that inelasticity in crime rates will be seen as political failure. What incentives are there for police to create stronger and more accessible crime data with local addressability, incentives that can offset the political risks that some departments may fear?
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From page 119... ...
. Economic deprivation and neighbor hood crime rates, 1960-1980.
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From page 120... ...
. The epidemic theory of ghettos and neighborhood effects on drop ping out and teenage childbearing.
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From page 121... ...
. Income inequality, race, and place: Does the distribution of race and class within neighborhoods affect crime rates?
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From page 122... ...
. Neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth: Evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment.
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From page 123... ...
. Violent crime and the spatial dynamics of neighborhood transition: Chicago, 1970-1990.
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(2008) Moving to inequality: Neighborhood effects and experiments meet social structure.
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From page 125... ...
. Neighborhood changes in ecology and violence.
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From page 126... ...
relevance of aggregation bias for multi-level studies of neighborhoods and crime with an example comparing census tracts to official neighborhoods in Cincinnati. Criminology, 40(4)
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