Objectives

Much recent work has focused on how crime concentrates on particular streets within communities. This is the first study to examine how such concentrations vary across the neighborhoods of a city. The analysis evaluates the extent to which neighborhoods have characteristic levels of crime concentration and then tests two hypotheses for explaining these variations: the compositional hypothesis, which posits that neighborhoods whose streets vary in land usage or demographics have corresponding disparities in levels of crime; and the social control hypothesis, which posits that neighborhoods with higher levels of collective efficacy limit crime to fewer streets.

Methods

We used 911 dispatches from Boston, MA, to map violent crimes across the streets of the city. For each census tract we calculated the concentration of crime across the streets therein using the generalized Gini coefficient and cross-time stability in the locations of hotspots.

Results

Neighborhoods did have characteristic levels of concentration that were best explained by the compositional hypothesis in the form of demographic and land use diversity. In addition, ethnic heterogeneity predicted higher concentrations of crime over and above what would be expected given the characteristics of the individual streets, suggesting it exacerbated disparities in crime.

Conclusions

The extent to which crime concentrates represents an underexamined aspect of how crime manifests in each community. It is driven in part by the diversity of places in the neighborhood, but also can be influenced by neighborhood-level processes. Future work should continue to probe the sources and consequences of these variations.

中文翻译：

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犯罪如何以及为什么在某些地区比其他地区更集中？：社区犯罪的新维度

目标

最近的许多工作都集中在犯罪如何集中在社区内的特定街道上。这是第一项研究这种浓度在城市各个社区之间如何变化的研究。该分析评估了邻里的犯罪集中度的特征程度，然后检验了两个假设来解释这些变化：组成假说，该假说假设街道上土地使用或人口统计变化的邻里在犯罪水平上有相应的差异；以及社会控制假说，该假说认为，集体效力较高的社区将犯罪限制在较少的街道上。

方法

我们使用了来自马萨诸塞州波士顿的911派遣人员来绘制整个城市街道上的暴力犯罪记录。对于每个人口普查区，我们使用广义基尼系数和热点位置的跨时间稳定性来计算整个街道的犯罪集中度。

结果

邻里确实具有特征性的集中度，最好由人口和土地利用多样性形式的构成假说来解释。此外，种族异质性预示着犯罪的集中度将超出个别街道的特征，这比预期的要高，这说明犯罪加剧了犯罪悬殊。

结论

犯罪集中的程度代表了犯罪在每个社区如何表现的未充分审视的方面。它部分地受到邻里地点多样性的驱动，但也可能受到邻里级过程的影响。未来的工作应继续探讨这些差异的来源和后果。