States, Streets, and Suites: Testing a Theory of Legal Cynicism, Systemic Exclusion, and Reported Crime

• In Event: Poverty and Crime

Abstract

An array of chronic adverse conditions combined with newly unfavorable circumstances, accumulating and compounding over decades, have intensified neighborhood disadvantage and increased levels of reported crime and calls for police assistance. We examine this kind of variation in an analysis of tract level 911 calls for police assistance about property and personal crimes from 2006 through 2008 in Chicago. Our key theoretical variables are also analyzed at the tract level and include census measures, attitudinal survey data, and official data on incarceration and housing foreclosures. Multi-level, negative binomial analyses show that a number of neighborhood-level attributes--concentrated disadvantage, racial segregation, and legal cynicism--are significantly associated with calls about crime to the police, compounding the individual harmful effects of these variables. We find further compounding effects of systemic exclusion involving state based policies of incarceration and financial and housing industry practices leading to foreclosures. The full accumulation of these effects reflect a century or more of racially concentrated systemic exclusion, leading to cumulative and compounding disadvantage, and culminating in elevated levels of contemporary citizen reports of crime and calls for police assistance.

Authors

• John Hagan, Northwestern University

• Bill McCarthy, University of California, Davis

• Andrea Cann Chandrasekher, University of California, Davis

• Daniel Herda, Merrimack College