Theorizing.
The key factor, as it turns out, lies in the growing racial, ethnic, and demographic diversity of our cities and metro areas. Our analysis found that the Hispanic share of the population is negatively associated with urban crime. Crime also fell as the percentage of the population that is non-white and the percentage that is gay increased. And of all the variables in our analysis, the one that is most consistently negatively associated with crime is a place’s percentage of foreign-born residents. . Not only did we find a negative correlation (-.36) between foreign-born share and crime in general, the pattern held across all of the many, various types of crime – from murder and arson to burglary and car theft. The Brookings study also finds evidence of a substantial shift in the connection between foreign-born residents and crime. While foreign-born share was positively associated with crime in 1990 and 2000, that relationship had disappeared by 2008. The foreign-born share of population now shows no relationship to property crime, and a negative relationship to violent crime. The pattern is most pronounced for primary cities and inner-ring suburbs, the Brookings study found, but not for lower-density suburbs and ex-urbs.
New to real estate site Trulia is CrimeMaps, a way to browse crimes in cities by type—say, assault or theft—neighborhood, intersection, and hour of the day. An aptly named “Heat Map” on the lefthand side of the page charts crime frequency by color, making it easy to see where the most bad stuff goes down.
When the FBI announced last week that violent crime in the U.S. had reached a 40-year low in 2010, many criminologists were perplexed. It had been a dismal year economically, and the standard view in the field, echoed for decades by the media, is that unemployment and poverty are strongly linked to crime.
Cupcakes and gangs, violence and sugar, “are perceived to exist in separate worlds.” And yet, as the Mission Local blog reports, a recent homicide, followed swiftly by a lunchtime gunfight, “offered Mission District residents a reminder that the hip neighbourhood where they feast on everything from the latest doughnut recipe to cupcakes and artisan pork rinds is also a place where gang violence still exists, and where a 2007 gang injunction is still in place.”
Gangs and Cupcakes: Violence and Sugar Go Together - Nicola Twilley - Life - The Atlantic
The crime rate in Oregon is down, but most Oregonians feel that the rate has gone up, and that they are less safe. I think this story has some interesting parallels with a recent British Medical Journal editorial on cognitive bias, and why what we hear and remember is often very different from the facts we are told. I highly recommend reading both these links together.
Alberta Street, SE17 (by James.D.)
From series “Man Murdered in street shooting.”
The photos in this series were taken on streets in London where somebody died as a result of a shooting. The victim died either at the scene or later as a result of their injuries. My aim in this series is to highlight the mundane. I didn’t want to find the exact location where each incident happened or go into the details of each murder. The intention here is just to show the utterly ordinary places where the extraordinary took place, forever assosciating a street with a horrific crime.
“StumbleSafely, visualizes crime levels surrounding Washington DC bars and Metro stops. The site integrates crime statistics from the police department to create a map that gives important context to a specific user base.”
BUT, as a subsequent PSFK post points out:
“I think there is a problem with this kind of mapping – mainly that you risk stigmatizing certain neighborhoods and areas, driving down property values, increasing fear levels, spurring people with resources to move out of the area and generally, you risk compounding the problem rather than solving it.”
