Can Residential Segregation Still Predict Racial and Ethnic Gaps in Homicide Victimization Rates?

• In Event: Violent Crime and Racial Segregation: Predictors and Collateral Consequences

Abstract

Research released in recent years by Moody’s, Citigroup, and the Federal Reserve suggests that more racially-integrated (less segregated) census tracts and counties significantly benefit residents in those area through higher GDP’s, higher home prices, shorter commute times to work, better credit availability, more business activity, and lower crime rates. The general sense seems to be that neighborhoods that are more racially-segregated may facilitate harms to residents who live there. I focus on the latter issue, crime, with a particular focus on the empirical relationship between two indices of racial residential segregation and their predictive association with racially-disaggregated homicide victimization rates, per the Centers for Disease Control. A notable pattern in homicide victimization data is the overrepresentation of blacks. Beginning in the late 1980s, researchers highlighted the bleak picture of life (and death by homicide) for black Americans living in highly segregated cities. For this study, I update the literature by examining empirical associations between recent measures of residential segregation (using 2020 Decennial Census data) on disaggregated homicide victimization rates by race and ethnicity (black, white, and Hispanic). The results provide part of a picture of the dramatic costs of the continued spatial and structural inequality of residential segregation.

Author

• James W. Kanan, Western Kentucky University