The Ecology of Crime and Deviance: Identifying Gang Membership Using Blau Status Analysis

• In Event: 600 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Innovations in Methodology and Analysis

Abstract

This paper uses the recently-developed method of Blau Status Analysis (BSA) to identify membership in deviant organizations. The mechanism of organizational competition is developed to explain how it affects organizational affiliation generally and gang membership specifically. Using the Add Health dataset that contains the “ground truth” of actual gang membership, this paper deploys the BSA approach to predict persons belonging to gangs and then evaluates the sensitivity and specificity of the models using ROC curves. It compares the Blau status variables, with more conventional variables used to predict gang membership and finds the former to be strongly predictive, particularly in models that incorporate Blau status variables along with conventional variables. The paper discusses the implications of the research for identifying not only gang members but other members of deviant organizations such as terrorist groups, as well as issues that this work raises for civil liberties.

Authors

• Michael Genkin, Singapore Management University

• Matthew E. Brashears, Cornell University