Parks as crime inhibitors or generators: Examining parks and the role of their nearby context

Abstract

Although neighborhood studies often focus on the presence of some particular entity and its consequences for a variety of local processes, a frequent limitation is the failure to account more broadly for the local context. This paper therefore examines the role of parks for community crime, but contributes to the literature by testing whether the context of land use and demographics nearby parks moderate the parks and crime relationship. A key feature of our approach is that we also test how these characteristics explain crime in the park, nearby the park, and in other neighborhoods in the city with data from nine cities across the United States (N= 109,808 blocks). We use multilevel Poisson and negative binomial regressions to test our ideas for six types of street crime. Our findings show that nearby land uses and socio-demographic characteristics are a key driver of crime being located within the park or nearby the park. Our results also show a clear distance decay pattern for the impact of various land uses and sociodemographics nearby parks. The results emphasize a need for research to consider the broader socio-spatial context in which crime generators/inhibitors are embedded.

Mapping the Risk Terrain for Crime Using Machine Learning

“…These can be the interactions between different elements of the built environment to influence human behavioral patterns, the possibility that crime affects demographic change and social cohesion and vice versa (Hipp and Steenbeek 2016), as well as whether particular demographic factors moderate or mediate those particular crime relationships (Deryol et al 2016; Jones and Pridemore 2018). 3 For example, the effect of a liquor store on crime may be more pronounced in a neighborhood with higher levels of poverty (Wheeler and Waller 2009), or a park may only be criminogenic conditional on other local land use factors (Boessen and Hipp 2018). These are mostly tested via identifying interactions between different crime generator factors and census demographics (Jones and Pridemore 2018;Smith, Frazee, and Davison 2000).…”

Advances in Spatial Criminology: The Spatial Scale of Crime

“…Although the authors do not theorize why micro-level characteristics should interact with social disorganization measures at the meso-level explicitly, this work is informative as they find that indicators of opportunity and social disorganization both matter for crime at the segment-level, and that the inclusion of neighborhood measures improved the fit of their models. Other studies have taken a similar approach to studying how the context surrounding crime attractors/generators conditions their effect on crime (Boessen & Hipp 2018, Contreras 2017, Contreras & Hipp 2019, Kubrin & Hipp 2016, Stucky et al 2012. Browning and Jackson (2013) draw upon urban ecological theory (Hawley 1950, Jacobs 1961) and make novel use of the PHDCN data to examine how street ecologies (active streets, or "eyes on the street") have a variable effect on crime depending on the social organizational conditions (anonymity and collective efficacy) of the broader neighborhood ecology.…”

The Impact of Green Space on Violent Crime in Urban Environments: An Evidence Synthesis

“…Intervention studies at multiple scales (from small green oases to extensive parks and greenways), particularly those that involve longitudinal pre/post field experiments [11,48,49,55,67,68].…”