Inequality and Crime: A Multilevel Examination

• In Event: Spatial and Multilevel Perspectives

Abstract

Most research on communities and crime has found a positive association between economic inequality and crime, suggesting that places with greater amounts of relative deprivation have more crime. Various levels of analysis have been used in this line of research, including census block groups, tracts, neighborhood clusters, cities, states, and countries. However, the majority of this research has only analyzed associations at one level of analysis at a time, and most recent research has tended to focus on neighborhoods and smaller levels of analysis. The current investigation measures inequality at three different levels simultaneously in order to distinguish the effect of inequality on crime at each level from the effect at other levels. I combine demographic information from the American Community Survey with crime-incident data from the NIJ Foreclosure and Crime Data Archive for 35 U.S. cities for the years 2005-2009, and use multilevel modeling to separate out the effects of inequality at the census block-group level, the tract level, and the city level. Findings indicate that the association between income inequality and crime is different at each level of analysis, and that the association at each level is dependent on the amount of inequality at other levels.

Author

• Marin Wenger, Florida State University