Race, Crime, and the Changing Fortunes of Urban Neighborhoods, 1999–2013

Abstract

For over a century, scholars have traced higher levels of serious crime in minority compared to White neighborhoods to stark socioeconomic inequality. Yet, this research is largely cross-sectional and does not assess how ethnoracial differences in crime patterns evolve over time in response to shifting structural conditions. The new century witnessed substantial changes to the circumstances that undergird the ethnoracial divide in neighborhood crime as well as a national crime decline. How are the changing dynamics of urban inequality reinforcing or diminishing racial and ethnic disparities in neighborhood crime in the context of the "Great American Crime Decline"? We address this question by first identifying distinct paths of violent and property crime change between 1999 and 2013 for almost 2700 neighborhoods across eighteen cities. We then assess how initial and changing levels of disadvantage, housing instability, and demographics explain divergent crime trajectories within neighborhoods. We find that most neighborhoods have lower levels of homicide and burglary than fifteen years ago. However, homicide and burglary increased in some neighborhoods, and this trend is largely limited to Black neighborhoods. Disadvantage and the housing crisis are critical in accounting for the heightened risk of neighborhoods having increasing rather than decreasing crime trends. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.In contrast, immigration is linked with declining and stable trends in violent and property crime. Overall, results indicate a widening of the racial-spatial divide for the most marginalized communities in the United States.

Inequalities and crime

“…Other researchers have added that it is important to consider not only offending but also violent victimization if we are to understand how race and ethnic inequality shape crime in the United States (Sampson & Lauritsen, ; Xie, ). Somewhat consistent with the findings of Krivo and colleagues (), Janet Lauritsen and I have found that, even at the national level, Black and Latino males experienced increases in victimization rates during economic recessions up through the early 2000s, which was not the case for White males (Lauritsen & Heimer, ). One great advantage to studying race and class inequities in crime by examining victimization is that we can use the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to create estimates of exposure to violence among minority groups and can assess the role of poverty in explaining group differences.…”

“…Moreover, when the next cycles of economic crises hit, they are predicted to be most devastating for the already destitute (Edin & Shaefer, ) or the hyperdisadvantaged (Peterson & Krivo, ). We need more work along the lines of Peterson and Krivo's (, Krivo et al., ) recent research, in which they pinpoint the most highly disadvantaged groups that will be most vulnerable to crime, violence, and victimization when the next economic downslide occurs. Criminologists would do well to continue researching how cross‐cutting inequalities create particularly acute disadvantage and exposure to crime and violence.…”

“…This racial divide is so strong that other research findings in this tradition have shown that even the well‐established and seemingly pervasive patterns of crime decline since the 1990s do not hold in some disadvantaged neighborhoods, where crimes such as homicide and burglary have increased during the past 15 years (Krivo, Vélez, Lyons, Phillips, & Sabbath, ). Therefore, better understanding trends in crime and violence over time may require examining how the patterns observed at national and even local levels may vary across neighborhoods depending on the levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and racial segregation.…”

Buffalo's West Side Story: Migration, Gentrification, and Neighborhood Change

“…Since Shaw and McKay's original formulation, other scholars have theorized about the relationship between immigration and neighborhood transformation (Branic and Hipp ; Kirk and Laub ; Krivo et al. ; McDonald ; MacDonald et al. ).…”

Crime-poverty nexus: an intellectual survey

“…The number of studies confirmed that poverty leads to crime rates [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] while on the reverse side, the causal mechanism has been observed and concluded that higher crime rates lead to poverty incidence across countries. [9][10][11][12][13] These studies are largely discussed with different determinants of poverty and crime rates in different economic settings. These studies are on the same finding that poverty and crime interlinked with each other that affect socioeconomic and environmental factors, which influenced country's sustained growth in the long-run.…”