More Places than Crimes: Implications for Evaluating the Law of Crime Concentration at Place

Bernasco, Wim; Steenbeek, Wouter

doi:10.1007/s10940-016-9324-7

Cited by 103 publications

(126 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…the sum of the entries of a row u of I * is often much smaller than than the number of columns n P ). In such cases, the Gini index displays a bias towards high values [7] of g * (see SI) since the denominator of Equation 4 is small and the possibility of perfect equidistribution -i.e. the same number of likes on each page -cannot be achieved.…”

Section: Attention Patterns On Pagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selective exposure shapes the Facebook news diet

Cinelli¹,

Brugnoli²,

Schmidt

et al. 2020

PLoS ONE

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The social brain hypothesis fixes to 150 the number of social relationships we are able to maintain. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility up to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies showed the tendency of users to ignore dissenting information but to interact with information adhering to their point of view. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze users' attention economy in news consumption on social media by analyzing 14M users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of 6 years. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. We find that, independently of their activity, users show the tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favored pages. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users behavior to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest.Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users' activity on social media and that selective exposure -i.e. the tendency of users to consume information interest coherent with their preferences -could be a major driver in their consumption patterns. *

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Section: Attention Patterns On Pagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selective exposure shapes the Facebook news diet

Cinelli¹,

Brugnoli²,

Schmidt

et al. 2020

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It is important to note that it is not the Gini coefficient computed directly from the number of crimes suffered by each member of the population [previously used to measure the concentration of crime (Tseloni and Pease 2005;Fox and Tracy 1988;Bernasco and Steenbeek 2016)], but rather it is the Gini coefficient of the rate at which individuals suffer crime. The RECC is given by…”

Section: Concentration Of Crime Metricmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This metric, however, has some severe issues, such as the lack of agreement on the percentage that gets reported (Fox and Tracy 1988); the metric might not be comparable between different cities (Hipp and Kim 2016); it might be the result of a certain degree of randomness (Levin et al 2016) and it does not work as an adequate metric when the data is extremely sparse. Consider, for example, the number of street segments of The Hague and the number of sexual offences registered by the police between 2007 and 2009 in that city (Bernasco and Steenbeek 2016). The extremely low frequency of this type of crime (only 430 cases) distributed over the large number of street segments (14,375 segments) means that taking the top 5% of streets is not even properly defined since, at most, 3% of the segments concentrate all the crimes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, there is still a major drawback in using the Gini coefficient directly from the number of crimes suffered by the population. The Gini coefficient is a valid metric with distinct values in the context where a variable, such as income, is distributed across most of the members of the population, but in the case of crime, the majority of the population suffers zero crimes and so the coefficient, computed directly from the number of crimes suffered by the population (or the number of crimes on each street segment) overestimates the level of concentration (Bernasco and Steenbeek 2016). In the previous example of populations A and B, the Gini coefficient of the number of crimes is fairly similar given by G A ¼ 0:95 and G B ¼ 0:97 respectively, which reveals that crime is highly concentrated, but nothing more, providing little additional information to distinguish between the concentration observed in A and B.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When there are more individuals than crimes, as it is almost always the case, or more street segments than crimes, as it sometimes occurs, then an arithmetic adjustment to the Gini coefficient has been proposed (Bernasco and Steenbeek 2016) which compares against a case of maximum equality (termed the generalised Gini coefficient denoted as G 0 ). Although the generalised Gini coefficient is a clever way to correct the traditional Gini coefficient, it still has one major drawback.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Measuring the Distribution of Crime and Its Concentration

2017

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Objectives Generally speaking, crime is, fortunately, a rare event. As far as modelling is concerned, this sparsity of data means that traditional measures to quantify concentration are not appropriate when applied to crime suffered by a population. Our objective is to develop a new technique to measure the concentration of crime which takes into account its low frequency of occurrence and its high degree of concentration in such a way that this measure is comparable over time and over different populations.Methods This article derives an estimate of the distribution of crime suffered by a population based on a mixture model and then evaluates a new and standardised measurement of the concentration of the rates of suffering a crime based on that distribution. ResultsThe new measure is successfully applied to the incidence of robbery of a person in Mexico and is able to correctly quantify the concentration crime in such a way that is comparable between different regions and can be tracked over different time periods. ConclusionsThe risk of suffering a crime is not uniformly distributed across a population. There are certain groups which are statistically immune to suffering crime but there are also groups which suffer chronic victimisation. This measure improves our understanding of how patterns of crime can be quantified allowing us to determine if a Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10940-017-9354-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. prevention policy results in a crime reduction rather than target displacement. The method may have applications beyond crime science.

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Can Precision Policing Reduce Gun Violence? Evidence from “Gang Takedowns” in New York City

Chalfin¹,

LaForest²,

Kaplan³

2021

J Policy Anal Manage

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During the last decade, while national homicide rates have remained flat, New York City has experienced a second great crime decline, with gun violence declining by more than 50 percent since 2011. In this paper, we investigate one potential explanation for this dramatic and unexpected improvement in public safety—the New York Police Department's shift to a more surgical form of “precision policing,” in which law enforcement focuses resources on a small number of individuals who are thought to be the primary drivers of violence. We study New York City's campaign of “gang takedowns” in which suspected members of criminal gangs were arrested in highly coordinated raids and prosecuted on conspiracy charges. We show that gun violence in and around public housing communities fell by approximately one third in the first year after a gang takedown. Our estimates imply that gang takedowns explain nearly one quarter of the decline in gun violence in New York City's public housing communities over the last eight years.

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More Places than Crimes: Implications for Evaluating the Law of Crime Concentration at Place

Cited by 103 publications

References 21 publications

Selective exposure shapes the Facebook news diet

Selective exposure shapes the Facebook news diet

Measuring the Distribution of Crime and Its Concentration

Can Precision Policing Reduce Gun Violence? Evidence from “Gang Takedowns” in New York City

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