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Theoretical and empirical literature on the social ecology of crime has argued that dramatic changes in the U.S. post-industrial urban economy combined with discrimination and persistently high levels of segregation have led to the concentration of disadvantage in urban areas, and particularly in poor, inner-city, African American communities. According to Anderson (1999), this context fosters alienation from mainstream society and the development of an oppositional culture whose norms support the widespread use of violence. Indeed, prior research has found that neighborhood structural characteristics predict adoption of the street code, which in turn increases the likelihood of engaging in violence and falling victim to it. However, less research has examined the community characteristics expected to reduce adoption of the street code and associated levels of violence; specifically, the presence of adult male role models and grandmothers. A small number of studies have examined the relationship between community levels of violence and the presence of male role models, but only for large units such as cities or counties. This study uses data for neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio, to examine the influence of structural characteristics on community levels of violence, and evaluates whether those effects are moderated by the presence of male role models and grandparents. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines homicide trends in Chicago neighborhoods from 1965-1995. Developmental and life-course criminologists have a relatively long history of examining the trajectories of criminal offending among individuals, identifying such categories as life-course persistent or chronic offenders, adolescent-limited offenders, and adolescent-peaked offenders. This approach has much promise for identifying community 'careers' in crime, and macro-level researchers have increasingly experimented with a variety of methods to identify such trajectories. The current paper uses semi-parametric group-based modeling to identify unique homicide trajectories in Chicago neighborhoods over the course of 30 years. Going beyond prior research, and drawing primarily on social disorganization theory, potential macro-structural determinants of those trajectories are then examined. Predictors include neighborhood characteristics such as concentration of poverty, unemployment, single-headed households, divorce, racial context, density, and population instability. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial residential segregation has become an increasingly important factor in research on variation in levels of formal social control. This is particularly true of research from the conflict perspective, and especially in tests of the effect of perceived racial threat on city-level variation in police size, police expenditures, and arrest rates. The theoretical expectation is that higher levels of segregation will reduce levels of racial threat among whites, which subsequently reduces the need for crime control. Empirical findings are mixed, but these inconsistent results may be partly due to an improper conceptualization of segregation vis-a-vis the racial threat perspective. Despite theoretical emphasis on the concept of exposure, all prior studies have employed a measure of segregation that, instead, reflects the extent to which groups are equally dispersed across neighborhoods. This measure is not necessarily related to exposure either conceptually or empirically. The present study utilizes a novel measure of racial residential exposure, developed with spatial analytic methods, to provide a more conceptually true test of this aspect of the racial threat hypothesis. Specifically, we examine the effect of whites' aggregate levels of residential exposure to blacks and Hispanics on variation in police expenditures across U.S. cities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the spatial and contextual features of race-specific stop rates, this paper combines structural indicators of racial threat, urban disadvantage and social disorganization with citizen-police contact data on more than 61,000 police stops in the Miami Dade area. While the existing racial profiling literature tends to vary greatly in scope and analytical strategy, research that takes into account spatial dynamics coupled with neighborhood characteristics when examining race-specific stop rates has yet to be offered. Furthermore, given the race and ethnic diversity of the Miami-Dade population, we assess and compare the rate of police stops involving Hispanic drivers to those of whites and African Americans within the context of Miami-Dade communities. Using a spatial multivariate regression technique, initial analysis reveal indicators of racial threat and social disorganization are predictive of race-specific stop rates, while controlling for levels of police misconduct and violent crime rates. Our results suggest that spatial analysis is consequential to the macro-level study of race-based policing. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminological analysis at the macro-level typically uses the crime rate as either an independent or dependent variable. Nearly without exception, it is simply calculated as the number of crimes in a given area divided by the residential population of the area. This may be a reasonable measure for some types of crime, such as burglary, which is more likely to be targeted against residences. However, for crime types where the victim is more mobile, such as assault, robbery, homicide, and auto-theft, using the residential population as the denominator almost certainly overestimates levels of crime in areas where the typical daytime population is considerably higher than the residential population. This paper uses Census data on daytime population for cities in the year 2000 to examine the impact that daily temporal population changes have on the measurement of crime rates. It also examines whether various predictors implied by popular macro-level theories affect crime rates differently depending on whether the rate is calculated using the residential population or the daytime population. Implications for testing macro-level theories of crime are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies have examined the extent to which blacks are disproportionately represented in the U.S. prison system. Some have found that at the national level this disparity can be explained by controlling for racial variation in arrest rates, while others have found persistent racial disparity within states, even after controlling for variation in arrest. The present study aims to build on these previous efforts using state-level, race-specific arrest and incarceration data for 1999 and 2000. In addition to analyzing a more recent period, we also examine various crime types including murder, other violent crimes, and drug offenses, for which we expect different results depending on levels of police discretion. Results indicate overall high levels of racial disparity in arrest and incarceration. Indeed, blacks continue to be disproportionately incarcerated even after controlling for racial variation in arrest. This is particularly true for drug-related crimes. With the inclusion of Census data, regression analysis is used to examine these disparities from the conflict perspective. It is expected that racial composition and segregation, as well as race-specific socioeconomic characteristics, will at least partly explain racial disparity in incarceration rates net of racial variation in arrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant theoretical literature posits that white racial attitudes in the U.S. are shaped in part by the racial context of the geographic areas in which they live, particularly the relative size and distribution of the black population. Recent research provides empirical evidence consistent with these claims, but that research has not considered the role of levels of violence for shaping white racial attitudes. This is a potentially serious omission given that violence rates are substantially higher in predominately black segregated areas and since white antipathy towards blacks has been inextricably linked to levels of violence, especially black violence rates. We address this gap in the empirical literature by reassessing the link between the racial context of places and white racial attitudes using a multilevel analytical strategy. Our multilevel regression analysis is based on individual-level data on white racial attitudes from the General Social Survey (GSS) that have been linked with contextual characteristics for the metropolitan areas and counties in which the respondents reside. These macro-level characteristics include census data on the relative size and distribution of the black population, and UCR data on levels of total and racially disaggregated homicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]