No Community Is an Island: The Effects of Resource Deprivation on Urban Violence in Spatially and Socially Proximate Communities*

Abstract

The link between resource deprivation and urban violence has long been explored in criminological research. Studies, however, have largely ignored the potential for resource deprivation in particular communities to affect rates of violence in others. The relative inattention is notable because of the strong theoretical grounds to anticipate influences that extend both to geographically contiguous areas and to those that, though not contiguous, share similar social characteristics. We argue that such influences-what we term spatial and social proximity effects, respectively-constitute a central feature of community dynamics. To support this argument, we develop and test theoretically derived hypotheses about spatial and social proximity effects of resource deprivation on aggregated and disaggregated homicide counts. Our analyses indicate that local area resource deprivation contributes to violence in socially proximate communities, an effect that, in the case of * Please direct correspondence to Daniel P. Mears

Violence in Urban Neighborhoods: A Longitudinal Study of Collective Efficacy and Violent Crime

“…This is perhaps unsurprising given the strong relationship between poverty and violence more generally, yet even after controlling for other community conditions, including previous violence, disadvantage in the focal and neighboring areas can lead to higher violence. In their study of the spatial relationship between resource deprivation and homicide, Mears and Bhati (2006) find that the spatial proximity of disadvantage is more consequential for homicide in the focal neighborhood than the level of homicide in neighboring 9 communities. This leads them to conclude that the "spatial diffusion mechanism often found in the homicide literature could be an artefact of omitting the spatially lagged resource deprivation measure" (Mears and Bhati, 2006: 528).…”

“…Spatial dynamics are arguably important in explaining the dynamic relationship between concentrated disadvantage, collective efficacy and violence and evidence suggests that disadvantaged neighborhoods with high levels of violence tend to co-exist in space (Morenoff et al, 2001;Mears and Bhati, 2006;Sampson, 2012;Tita and Greenbaum, 2009). …”

Intra- and inter-neighborhood income inequality and crime

“…Several studies (e.g. Crutchfield 1989;Hipp 2007;Mears and Bhati 2006;Messner and Tardiff 1986;Patterson 1991;Wang and Arnold 2008), have considered these issues at lower levels of analysis such as neighborhood clusters or census tracts. As elaborated further below, theory and some research evidence suggest that income levels and inequality within neighborhoods affect crime.…”

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

“…In one of the first attempts to geographically ''unbound'' the autocorrelation matrix, Mears and Bhati (2006) model homicide by exploiting the finding that social similarity increases the probability of communication and social interaction (see McPherson et al 2001). The researchers examined race, ethnicity and income at the tract level and linked together the tracts only if the residents were similar.…”