Now more then ever we need your help keeping this channel producing REAL content for REAL people The “Great Crime Decline” of the past several decades is one of the most amazing and laudable developments in modern urban life. Since the 1990s, the rate of violent crime in America has been cut in half, from 750 violent crimes per 100,000 people to about 350 per 100,000 by 2013. New York City is now safer than London on many measures and Washington, D.C. was recently ranked as one of the 10 safest cities in the world.
But despite this overall drop, violent crime remains disturbingly higher in economically disadvantaged areas of cities, many of which have violent crime rates that are “exponentially higher” than the national average.
That’s the sobering takeaway from a detailed new study of violent crime and urban inequality by Andrew V. Papachristos of Northwestern University, Noli Brazil of the University of California, Davis, and Tony Cheng of Yale University and New York University.
The study, published in the sociology journal City and Community, traces the troubling connection between violent crime and socioeconomic disadvantage in Chicago since the 1990s. It focuses on the change in not just the baseline murder rate but in the relative murder rate in the city’s safest and most violent neighborhoods, and details how those changes are linked to urban inequality.
To get at this, the study charts the change in the murder rate across more than 300 Chicago neighborhood clusters since the 1990s. It examines these changes in violence in light of three key factors: concentrated disadvantage (factors including the poverty rate and unemployment), immigrant concentration, and residential stability (based on the share of owner-occupants and the percent of people who lived in the same house since 1995).
It employs two different measures to gauge the change in violent crime across neighborhoods: absolute change between the city’s most violent 10 percent of neighborhoods and the rest; and relative change, which it defines as “the extent to which the actual homicide rate distribution deviates from a hypothetical distribution in which every neighborhood has identical shares of homicides.”
While Chicago as a whole got considerably safer over time, violence remains heavily concentrated in a relatively small number of less-advantaged, mainly black neighborhoods. The city as a whole experienced a 47 percent decline in homicides in the nearly two-decade period spanning 1991 and 2009. During this period, three-quarters of the city’s neighborhoods saw their homicides fall, including some of its most dangerous communities.
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