Dangerous Liaisons: A Network Analysis and a Longitudinal Study of Violence in the London Metropolitan Area

• In Event: Social Network Perspectives on Violence and Co-offending

Abstract

Association with violent offenders is a key risk factor for engagement in future violence. Recent criminological literature built on this idea to investigate whether violence circulates across networks of co-offenders. While evidence suggests that embedment in violence networks correlates with future violence, distinguishing between the latent influence of networks and that of their building blocks, that is co-offending relationships, is an elusive quest. Here, we address this matter by exploiting a novel dataset containing all crimes recorded in the London Metropolitan Area in 2018-2022. We proceed in two steps. First, we carry out the first exploration of London's violence network by drawing a very granular accounting of violence flows across individuals, producing a set of stylized facts. Second, we design a two-stage longitudinal study to assess the crime orbit of offenders who did not engage in violence in the first stage. We find that the effect of being associated with at least one violent co-offender during the exposure period raises the probability of committing violence with injury by 6.5% in the second period. We find that, on average, about 10% of this effect stems from the indirect influence of the network structure, indicating that violence circulates and compounds across the network.

Authors

• Andrea Giovannetti, Australian Catholic University

• Paolo Campana, University of Cambridge