Highlights• Tested community violence spatial dynamics (chronicity, pervasiveness, proximity) and youth outcomes • Behavioral dysregulation is related to home-and school-based chronic community violence.• Trait anxiety is uniquely predicted by the interaction of home-and school-based community violence.• One of the few studies to objectively measure community violence, comparing home and school settings

Much is known about how experiences of community violence negatively affect youth, but far less research has explored how youth remain resilient while living in dangerous neighborhoods. This study addresses this need by analyzing in‐depth, geo‐narrative interviews conducted with 15 youth (60% Black, 27% Latinx, 53% female, 14 to 17 years old) residing in low‐income, high‐crime Chicago neighborhoods to explore youths’ perceptions of safety and strategies for navigating neighborhood space. After carrying geographical positioning system (GPS) trackers for an eight‐day period, youths’ travel patterns were mapped, and these maps were used as part of an interview with youth that explored daily routines, with special consideration paid to where and when youth felt safe. Drawing on activity settings theory and exploring youth voice, we find that experiences of community violence are commonplace, but youth describe how they have safe spaces that are embedded within these dangerous contexts. Perceptions of safety and danger were related to environmental, social, and temporal cues. Youth reported four overarching safety strategies, including avoidance, hypervigilance, self‐defense, and emotional management, but these strategies considerably varied by gender. We discuss implications for practice and future directions of research. Highlights This study explored Chicago youths' safety strategies and resilience in high‐crime neighborhoods. Safe and dangerous spaces are embedded or overlapping settings. All youth practiced safety strategies but they considerably varied by gender. Perceptions are intersubjectively created due to the codes, rules, and norms of community life. Violence is common and extreme in everyday life of this sample of Chicago adolescents.

Differences in how individuals navigate and interact with physical space have clear implications for when and where they are exposed to environmental characteristics. To address this reality, we propose and test a novel method with a sample of Chicago adolescents that links individual GPS coordinates with locations of environmental characteristics as a strategy to increase precision in the measurement of environmental exposures. We use exposure to violent crime as an example and link the GPS coordinates of 51 youth collected over a one‐week period during the summer of 2016 to locations and times of violent crime. We explore different spatial and temporal parameters to determine whether an exposure occurred. Using the 660‐foot (201 m), 24‐hour operationalization, we found that youth were exposed to a total of 126 violent crimes, with an average of 3.82 (SD = 3.24) per respondent. This was higher than the 12 that were identified when exposure was calculated as the number of violent crimes occurring within 660 feet (201 m) of youths’ residential addresses during the week‐long assessment period. Examining correlations between the different exposure variables and measures of youths’ psychological functioning, we found the largest relationships when using the GPS‐based indices. We present a strategy for measuring exposure to environmental characteristics using GPS data. Higher rates of crime exposure are found based on GPS coordinates than with residential address. GPS‐based exposure measures are related to youths' psychological functioning.

Psychology is grounded in the ethical principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence, that is, “do no harm.” Yet many have argued that psychology as a field is attached to carceral systems and ideologies that uphold the prison industrial complex (PIC), including the field of community psychology (CP). There have been recent calls in other areas of psychology to transform the discipline into an abolitionist social science, but this discourse is nascent in CP. This paper uses the semantic device of “algorithms” (e.g., conventions to guide thinking and decision‐making) to identify the areas of alignment and misalignment between abolition and CP in the service of moving us toward greater alignment. The authors propose that many in CP are already oriented to abolition because of our values and theories of empowerment, promotion, and systems change; our areas of misalignment between abolition and CP hold the potential to evolve. We conclude with proposing implications for the field of CP, including commitments to the belief that (1) the PIC cannot be reformed, and (2) abolition must be aligned with other transnational liberation efforts (e.g., decolonization).

Predictive policing is a tool used increasingly by police departments that may exacerbate entrenched racial/ethnic disparities in the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). Using a Critical Race Theory framework, we analyzed arrest data from a predictive policing program, the Strategic Subject List (SSL), and questioned how the SSL risk score (i.e., calculated risk for gun violence perpetration or victimization) predicts the arrested individual's race/ethnicity while accounting for local spatial conditions, including poverty and racial composition. Using multinomial logistic regression with community area fixed effects, results indicate that the risk score predicts the race/ethnicity of the arrested person while accounting for spatial context. As such, despite claims of scientific objectivity, we provide empirical evidence that the algorithmically‐derived risk variable is racially biased. We discuss our study in the context of how the SSL reinforces a pseudoscientific justification of the PIC and call for the abolition of these tools broadly.