Neighborhood Inequality, Collective Efficacy, and the Spatial Dynamics of Urban Violence*

Abstract

Highlighting resource inequality, social processes, and spatial interdependence, this study combines structural characteristics from the 1990 census with a survey of 8,872 Chicago residents in 1995 to predict homicide variations in 1996-1 998 across 343 neighborhoods. Spatial proximity to homicide is strongly related to increased homicide rates, adjusting for internal neighborhood characteristics and prior homicide. Concentrated disadvantage and low collective efficacy-defined as the linkage of social control and cohesion-also independently predict increased homicide. Local organizations, voluntary associations, and frienaYkinship networks appear to be important only insofar as they promote the collective efficacy of residents in achieving social control and cohesion. Spatial dynamics coupled with neighborhood inequalities in social and economic capacity are therefore consequential f o r explaining urban violence.Over the course of the past century, criminological research in the ecological tradition has continually discovered the concentration of interpersonal violence in certain neighborhoods, especially those characterized by

Participatory accountability and collective action: Experimental evidence from Albania

“…7 One important society characteristic that has been shown to be negatively correlated with individual contributions to a publi c good (Habyarimana et al 2007), participation in community activities (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000), community-based monitoring of public service providers (Bjorkman and Svensson, 2010), and local public good provision (Miguel and Gugerty, 2004) is ethnic fragmentation. Neighborhood social and economic inequalities have also been shown to matter for urban violence (Morenoff, Sampson and Raudenbush, 2001) and collective civic action (Sampson et al, 2005). cooperation is also salient. While cooperative tendencies in public goods experiments have been shown to correlate with the management of forest commons by forest user groups in Ethiopia (Rustagi et al 2010), with Japanese fishermen's productivity when pooling their catches with other fishermen (Carpenter and Seki, 2011), and Brazilian fishermen's propensity not to over-exploit common fishing grounds (Fehr and Leibbrandt, 2011), this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study providing evidence of a correlation between individuals' behavior in a public goods experiment and their willingness to cooperate with others in participatory accountability systems and civic engagement.…”

Fear of crime, incivilities, and collective efficacy in four Miami neighborhoods

“…Research lends support for the conclusion that collective efficacy is a key social process in the production of violence. Neighborhoods with low collective efficacy, for example, experience significantly higher levels of crime, particularly serious violent crime such as homicide (Morenoff et al, 2001;Rader, Cossman, & Porter, 2012). These protective features exist at both the neighborhood and individual levels (Maimon & Browning, 2012;Rader et al, 2012).…”

Making Space for Theory: The Challenges of Theorizing Space and Place for Spatial Analysis in Criminology

“…The simple descriptive analysis of homicide data showed that urban minority males killed with guns represented the subpopulation at greatest risk for victimization. The combination of exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial regression analysis found evidence in support of the conclusion that violence was diffusing at the national level (Blumstein and Rosenfeld 1998;Cork 1999;Kellerman 1996), county level (Messner et al 1999;Baller et al 2001;Messner and Anselin 2004), and local levels (Block and Block 1993;Cohen and Tita 1999;Fagan et al 1998;Kennedy and Braga 1998;Klein et al 1991;Morenoff et al 2001). …”

“…On one hand the lack of independence might simply be a result of the clustering of important variables such as race and poverty in space. On the other hand, it was posited that there might be forces at work that make the level of crime in one neighborhood dependent upon the actions and activities occurring in other areas (Sampson 2004;Morenoff et al 2001). That is, social processes might be at work that result in the diffusion, or contagion of crime, across space over time (for a discussion of the types of diffusion and contagion, see Cohen and Tita 1999).…”