Crossing Lines, Reducing Crimes: Ecological Network Structure and Neighborhood Crime Rates

• In Event: Communities and Place: Activity Space Exposures, Community Perceptions, and Crime

Abstract

This study bridges communities and crime research with emerging scholarship on human mobility to explore how ecological networks—networks linking neighborhood residents through shared activity locations—shape urban crime. We use mobility data derived from GPS-enabled mobile device applications to measure neighborhood-levels of mobility overlap, calculated as the cosine similarities in residents’ visitation patterns to points of interest (e.g., retail stores, parks) and assessed its association with tract-level crime rates across seven major U.S. cities throughout 2019. Negative binomial regression models with city-level fixed effects reveal that tracts where residents tend to spatially overlap in their mobility patterns experience lower violent and non-violent crime rates. These results suggest overlapping mobility patterns may strengthen place-based monitoring and enhance a shared willingness to engage in informal social control within neighborhoods. This research extends the communities and crime literature by providing empirical evidence that spatial convergence through routine mobility contributes to crime reduction. These findings highlight the importance of considering ecological networks in understanding neighborhood crime and have implications for urban policies and programs that aim to leverage mobility patterns to enhance processes that foster safer communities.

Authors

• Brian Soller, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

• David M. Ramey, Penn State University