Assessing Street Drug Market Characteristics in Newark, NJ: Is There a Correlation between Churches and Crime?

• In Event: Examining Newark, New Jersey: Street Drug Markets, Violent Crime Places, and Police Interactions

Abstract

Street drug markets pose a profound threat to the quality of life in inner-city neighborhoods and have been a focus of the research community. Police arrest records between 2007 and 2009 in Newark, NJ show that drug arrests were heavily and steadily concentrated in a few locations. This research used online virtual streetscape images from Google Street View as an alternative to observe neighborhood data. To assess the quality of virtual data, two recruited raters virtually “walked” through a sample of 300 street blocks, while two other trained field observers walked through a sub-sample of the streets in person, using the same auditing instrument. The researcher then evaluates inter-rater reliability on a list of environmental items and found that churches showed a significant correlation with the presence of drug activity. This research concludes with a discussion of how the locations of churches and street types may be a crime facilitator within the neighborhood and its implications for criminological theory. This research also shows that online tools can provide a cost effective and reliable way to audit physical disorder characteristics of street drug markets in inner-city neighborhoods and its effect on the neighborhoods.

Author

• Ko-Hsin Hsu, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania