Traditional urban theories of community crime development increasingly are being adapted and evaluated for their relevance to the crime problems of smaller and less urban settings. Most notable of these have been social disorganization theory and civic community theory. This paper compares these two major theoretical frameworks for explaining community-level variations in crime, using county-le...

This article reports the findings from a localized spatial modeling approach and visual assessment of crime determinants in Flint, Michigan. Factors pertaining to socioeconomic condition, public health, social capital, environmental stress, and neighborhood context were analyzed spatially and statistically using exploratory data analysis, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA), ordinary least...

The spread of crime is a complex, dynamic process that calls for a systems level approach. Here, we build and analyze a series of dynamical systems models of the spread of crime, imprisonment and recidivism, using only abstract transition parameters. To find the general patterns among these parameters--patterns that are independent of the underlying particulars--we compute analytic expressions ...

The degree of income inequality in Sweden has varied substantially since the 1970s. This study analyzes whether this variation has affected the crime rate using a panel of Swedish county-level data for the period 1973–2000. We consider various measures of income inequality to evaluate which part of the distribution that matters most in determining crime rates. Our results indicate that there is...

While past research has suggested possible seasonal trends in crime rates, this study employs a novel methodology that directly models these changes and predicts them with explanatory variables. Using a nonlinear latent curve model, seasonal fluctuations in crime rates are modeled for a large number of communities in the U.S. over a three-year period with a focus on testing the theoretical pred...

This paper assesses the claim that sanctuary cities – defined as cities that expressly forbid city officials or police departments from inquiring into immigration status – are associated with post-hoc increases in crime. We employ a causal inference matching strategy to compare similarly situated cities where key variables are the same across the cities except the sanctuary status of the city. ...

During the late 1990s national rates of reported property and violent crime in Australia have been increasing (National Crime Statistics Unit 1997; Chilvers 1998; Cook & Leverett 1998), as have deaths from opioid overdoses. In 1996 there were 526 opioid-overdose fatalities, the majority of them involving males (Lynskey & Hall 1998). Alongside the overdose data a number of indicators from subgro...

This study shows a very strong association between preschool blood lead and subsequent crime rate trends over several decades in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. The relationship is characterized by best-fit lags (highest R2 and t-value for blood lead) consistent with neurobehavioral damage in the first year of life and the peak age of ...

Racial profiling—the use of race, ethnicity, or national origin by law enforcement officials to make judgments of criminal suspicion—is assessed in terms of its effect on targeted populations and on law enforcement efficiency. A mathematical simulation, comparing multiple profiling and non-profiling scenarios, is employed. This analysis indicates that racial profiling exacerbates incarceration ...