AmericanThinker | Sociology,
which is sometimes defined as the painful and tedious explication of
the obvious, occasionally comes up with useful insights, or at least
proof that some useful insights are true. That seems to be the case with
a study by Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos, published in the
academic journal Social Science & Medicine, and featured in the Chicago Sun-Times.
It
turns out that being arrested with someone else is the best predictor
of who will get shot in Chicago. No, not by the police, as the Al
Sharptons of the world would like to claim. Shot by another civilian, in
the epidemic of shootings that have made Chicago at some times more
dangerous than Baghdad.
If you and another person get arrested together in Chicago, you’re both part of a loose network of people with a high risk of getting shot in the future, Yale University researchers say in a newly published study.
Only 6 percent of the people in Chicago between 2006 and 2012 were listed on arrest reports as co-offenders in crimes, the study says. But those people became the victims of 70 percent of the nonfatal shootings in the city over the same period.
The
logic is pretty simple: if you are the type of person who goes out and
commits crimes with others, you are probably connected to people who
commit crimes with some frequency. And that puts you at risk of getting
shot, because people who commit crimes sometimes shoot others who
become inconvenient, or who just get in the way.
The
study is done with social network analysis, studying who knows who and
how they interact, and drawing up networks that reveal the clustering
that results from various commonalities.
The latest Yale University study was built on Papachristos’ previous social-network research into murders on the West Side. He had studied killings between 2005 and 2010 in West Garfield Park and North Lawndale. About 70 percent of the killings occurred in what Papachristos found was a social network of only about 1,600 people — out of a population of about 80,000 in those neighborhoods. Inside that social network, the risk of being killed was 30 out of 1,000. For the others in those neighborhoods, the risk of getting murdered was less than one in 1,000.
These
statistics demonstrate the wisdom of the old adage, “Lie down with
dogs, wake up with fleas.” They also show that it is not per se that is
related to the higher incidence of violence in some black communities…
For every 100,000 people, an average of one white person, 28 Hispanics and 113 blacks became victims of nonfatal shootings every year in Chicago over the six-year study period.
… but rather the existence of networks of people who engage in violence and reinforce each other in patters of violent behavior.
There are some useful implications for policing in Chicago IF the race demagogues don’t start calling it profiling: Fist tap Big Don.
UMKC | An ongoing law enforcement effort to rethink strategies to reduce
violent crime in the Kansas City area has its own secret weapon: UMKC.
The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, part of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, is intimately involved in the Kansas City No Violence Alliance (NoVA). NoVA is a 2-year-old multi-agency effort to reduce gun-related violence.
Chancellor Leo E. Morton serves on NoVA’s governing board, and UMKC
faculty members and graduate students are embedded in NoVA’s effort to
implement a crime-prevention approach known as “focused deterrence,”
which helps police look beyond individual criminals to the criminals’
entire social networks.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police this month called
out UMKC’s relationship with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police
Department through NoVA when it awarded the department its 2014 bronze
medal for Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award. The award
recognizes law enforcement agencies that demonstrate excellence in
conducting and using research to improve police operations and public
safety.
UMKC became involved with NoVA at the very beginning. In 2012,
Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker came to Ken Novak, chair of
the Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, to ask how UMKC could
help curb a rising tide of violence on Kansas City-area streets. She’d
heard about focused deterrence and its success in other cities and
wanted to try it here. It just so happened that Andrew Fox had just
taken a job as a professor in UMKC’s criminology department, and Fox
happened to have experience with focused deterrence.
