In recent years, crime scholars and practitioners have pointed to the potential benefits of focusing police crime prevention efforts on crime places. Research suggests that there is significant clustering of crime in small places or "hot spots." A number of researchers have argued that crime problems can be reduced more efficiently if police officers focused their attention to these deviant places. In this article, we update and improve upon a previously completed Campbell Collaboration systematic review of the effects of hot spots policing and crime. Meta-analyses were used to determine the size, direction, and statistical significance of the overall impact of hot spots policing strategies on crime. The results of our research suggests that hot spots policing generates small but noteworthy crime reductions, and these crime control benefits diffuse into areas immediately surrounding targeted crime hot spots. Our analyses find that problem-oriented policing interventions generate larger mean effect sizes when compared to interventions that simply increase levels of traditional police actions in crime hot spots. We also find Anthony A. Braga is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and a Senior Research Fellow in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard University. Dr. Braga's research involves collaborating with criminal justice, social service, and communitybased organizations to address illegal access to firearms, reduce gang and group-involved violence, and control crime hot spots. His most recent book is Policing that only a small number of studies examine the impacts of hot spots policing on police-community relations. The extant research on this topic, however, suggests that community members have positive reactions to these focused policing actions.

High-profile cases of police violence—disproportionately experienced by black men—may present a serious threat to public safety if they lower citizen crime reporting. Using an interrupted time series design, this study analyzes how one of Milwaukee’s most publicized cases of police violence against an unarmed black man, the beating of Frank Jude, affected police-related 911 calls. Controlling for crime, prior call patterns, and several neighborhood characteristics, we find that residents of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods, especially residents of black neighborhoods, were far less likely to report crime after Jude’s beating was broadcast. The effect lasted for over a year and resulted in a total net loss of approximately 22,200 calls for service. Other local and national cases of police violence against unarmed black men also had a significant impact on citizen crime reporting in Milwaukee. Police misconduct can powerfully suppress one of the most basic forms of civic engagement: calling 911 for matters of personal and public safety.

Most sociological theories consider murder an outcome of the differential distribution of individual, neighborhood, or social characteristics. And while such studies explain variation in aggregate homicide rates, they do not explain the social order of murder, that is, who kills whom, when, where, and for what reason. This article argues that gang murder is best understood not by searching for its individual determinants but by examining the social networks of action and reaction that create it. In short, the social structure of gang murder is defined by the manner in which social networks are constructed and by people's placement in them. The author uses a network approach and incident-level homicide records to recreate and analyze the structure of gang murders in Chicago. Findings demonstrate that individual murders between gangs create an institutionalized network of group conflict, net of any individual's participation or motive. Within this network, murders spread through an epidemic-like process of social contagion as gangs evaluate the highly visible actions of others in their local networks and negotiate dominance considerations that arise during violent incidents.

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More than a century of empirical research examines how neighborhoods' emergent properties influence a host of phenomena such as crime, poverty, health, civic engagement, immigration, and economic inequality (for a recent review, see Sampson 2012). These studies typically conceive of such neighborhood effects as influencing behavior through neighborhood characteristics (e.g., population heterogeneity, level of segregation, or economic disadvantage) or social processes (e.g., collective efficacy), or as spatial processes between neighborhoods (e.g., diffusion). Theoretically bundled within these neighborhood effects are the social networks of actors and institutions. In fact, the presence, vitality, and stability of neighborhood social networks are often at the Abstract Nearly a century of empirical research examines how neighborhood properties influence a host of phenomena such as crime, poverty, health, civic engagement, immigration, and economic inequality. Theoretically bundled within these neighborhood effects are institutions' and actors' social networks that are the foundation of other neighborhood-level processes such as social control, mobilization, and cultural assimilation. Yet, despite such long-standing theoretical links between neighborhoods and social networks, empirical research rarely considers or measures dimensions of geography and social network mechanisms simultaneously. The present study seeks to fill this gap by analyzing how both geography and social networks influence an important social problem in urban America: gang violence. Using detailed data on fatal and non-fatal shootings, we examine effects of geographic proximity, organizational memory, and additional group processes (e.g., reciprocity, transitivity, and status seeking) on gang violence in Chicago and Boston. Results show adjacency of gang turf and prior conflict between gangs are strong predictors of subsequent gang violence. Furthermore, important network processes, including reciprocity and status seeking, also contribute to observed patterns of gang violence. In fact, we find that these spatial and network processes mediate racial effects, suggesting the primacy of place and the group in generating gang violence.