Miami Vice: Unpacking the Drug Activity and Neighborhood Violent Crime Nexus

• In Event: People, Places, and Time: Consequences for Crime

Abstract

Although Goldstein’s (1985) seminal piece on the drugs-violence nexus has been a mainstay in the drugs and crime literature, communities and crime studies in criminology have largely neglected and left under-theorized how drug activity and violence may be related across time and space. Although studies examining the drugs-violence nexus have found a robust relationship at the city-level, few have examined whether such a relationship holds up at smaller geographic scales. Still further, the few studies examining whether drug activity and neighborhood violent crime are related have been cross-sectional, thereby limiting inferences regarding the causal nature of the relationship between drug activity and violence. We build on the literature on the drugs-violence nexus by using Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Part 1 and Part 2 point incident data provided by the Miami-Dade Police Department and employing cross-lagged, longitudinal models to unpack the dynamic nature of the drugs-violence nexus at the block-level in Miami-Dade County, Florida. We flexibly assess both the temporal and spatial scale of these processes; this allows us to assess whether any violence produced in blocks with more drug activity spills over into the surrounding area, implying a spatial diffusion process. Such a process has heretofore been unexplored—and hence, untheorized—in prior literature on the drugs-violence nexus. In light of our findings, implications and avenues for future research will be discussed.

Authors

• Christopher Contreras, University of California, Irvine

• John R. Hipp, University of California, Irvine