A longstanding tradition of research linking neighborhood disadvantage to higher rates of violence is based on the characteristics of where people reside. This Essay argues that we need to look beyond residential neighborhoods to consider flows of movement throughout the wider metropolis. Our basic premise is that a neighborhood’s well-being depends not only on its own socioeconomic conditions but also on the conditions of neighborhoods that its residents visit and are visited by—connections that form through networks of everyday urban mobility. Based on the analysis of large-scale urban-mobility data, we find that while residents of both advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago travel far and wide, their relative isolation by race and class persists. Among large U.S. cities, Chicago’s level of racially segregated mobility is the second highest. Consistent with our major premise, we further show that mobility-based socioeconomic disadvantage predicts rates of violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods beyond their residence-based disadvantage and other neighborhood characteristics, including during recent years that witnessed surges in violence and other broad social changes. Racial disparities in mobility-based disadvantage are pronounced—more so than residential neighborhood disadvantage. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of neighborhood effects on crime and criminal justice contact, collective efficacy, and racial inequality.
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The U.S. Racial Structure and Ethno-Racial Inequality in Urban Neighborhood Crime, 2010–2013
Stark ethno-racial differences in reported neighborhood crime are a major facet of contemporary U.S. inequality. However, the most generalizable research on neighborhood inequality in crime across cities is only for 2000. Many of the underpinnings of crime have changed since 2000—increases in socioeconomic segregation, the Great Recession and attendant housing crisis, the continuation of the crime decline, shifting trends in incarceration and other types of social control, and small decreases in racial residential segregation. We provide a much-needed assessment of whether ethno-racial reported neighborhood crime disparities have increased, remained stable, or decreased in the contemporary period. We invoke a racial structural perspective that traces ethno-racial disparities in neighborhood crime to the divergent community conditions emblematic of the U.S. racial hierarchy. Using newly collected data for 8,557 neighborhoods in 71 large U.S. cities for 2010–2013, we demonstrate that violent and property crime is lower in White, African American, Latino, minority, and multiethnic neighborhoods than in 2000. However, smaller relative decreases in African American neighborhoods widened the relative crime gap from other ethno-racial communities. Supporting the racial structural perspective, large ethno-racial inequalities in neighborhood well-being account for most of the crime gaps, with disadvantage and residential lending being most important. This suggests that non-White neighborhoods need economic investments to reduce the harmful and inequitable consequences of neighborhood crime.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10184012
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2332-6492
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 350-368
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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