The Racialized Effect of Nearby Violence Across a Violent Crime Distribution

• In Event: Violence

Abstract

Not only is neighborhood violence a function of local structural conditions, rates of violence in adjacent spaces also bear association. Neighborhoods are permeable, interdependent entities, by which residents and non-residents travel to and through for sustenance, legitimate, and illegitimate business. As such, violent conflicts occurring in focal neighborhoods have the potential to spillover to adjacent ones, and vice versa. In spite of substantial knowledge on adjacency effects, left unclear are the conditions under which nearby violence matters the most. We demonstrate that not only does the effect of nearby violence become increasingly consequential as local violence increases, but that said effect is contingent upon local racial composition. To develop these arguments, we use quantile regression to model the effects of violence in adjacent neighborhoods at multiple quintiles of a violent crime distribution. In doing so we account for the different structural contexts of African American and White neighborhoods by performing race-disaggregated analyses across a large sample of cities in the United States.

Authors

• Juwan Zacchaeus Bennett, Temple University

• Lallen Johnson, Drexel University