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Importance: The root causes of violent crime in Black urban neighborhoods are structural, including residential racial segregation and concentrated poverty. Previous work suggests that simple and scalable place-based environmental interventions can overcome the legacies of neighborhood disinvestment and have implications for health broadly and crime specifically., Objective: To assess whether structural repairs to the homes of low-income owners are associated with a reduction in nearby crime., Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional study using difference-in-differences analysis included data from the City of Philadelphia Basic Systems Repair Program (BSRP) from January 1, 2006, through April 30, 2013. The unit of analysis was block faces (single street segments between 2 consecutive intersecting streets) with or without homes that received the BSRP intervention. The blocks of homes that received BSRP services were compared with the blocks of eligible homes that were still on the waiting list. Data were analyzed from December 1, 2019, to February 28, 2021., Exposures: The BSRP intervention includes a grant of up to $20 000 provided to low-income owners for structural repairs to electrical, plumbing, heating, and roofing damage. Eligible homeowners must meet income guidelines, which are set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and vary yearly., Main Outcomes and Measures: The main outcome was police-reported crime across 7 major categories of violent and nonviolent crimes (homicide, assault, burglary, theft, robbery, disorderly conduct, and public drunkenness)., Results: A total of 13 632 houses on 6732 block faces received the BSRP intervention. Owners of these homes had a mean (range) age of 56.5 (18-98) years, were predominantly Black (10 952 [78.6%]) or Latino (1658 [11.9%]) individuals, and had a mean monthly income of $993. These census tracts compared with those without BSRP intervention had a substantially larger Black population (49.5% vs 12.2%; |D| = 0.406) and higher unemployment rate (17.3% vs 9.3%; |D| = 0.357). The main regression analysis demonstrated that the addition to a block face of a property that received a BSRP intervention was associated with a 21.9% decrease in the expected count of total crime (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 0.78; 95% CI, 0.76-0.80; P < .001), 19.0% decrease in assault (IRR, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.79-0.84; P < .001), 22.6% decrease in robbery (IRR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.75-0.80; P < .001), and 21.9% decrease in homicide (IRR, 0.78; 95% CI, 0.71-0.86; P < .001). When restricting the analysis to blocks with properties that had ever received a BSRP intervention, a total crime reduction of 25.4% was observed for each additional property (IRR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.73-0.77; P < .001). A significant dose-dependent decrease in total crime was found such that the magnitude of association increased with higher numbers of homes participating in the BSRP on a block., Conclusions and Relevance: This study found that the BSRP intervention was associated with a modest but significant reduction in crime. These findings suggest that intentional and targeted financial investment in structural, scalable, and sustainable place-based interventions in neighborhoods that are still experiencing the lasting consequences of structural racism and segregation is a vital step toward achieving health equity.

Vacant and blighted urban land is a widespread and potentially risky environmental condition encountered by millions of people on a daily basis. About 15% of the land in US cities is deemed vacant or abandoned, an area roughly the size of Switzerland. In a citywide cluster randomized controlled trial, we investigated the effects of standardized, reproducible interventions that restore vacant land on the commission of violence, crime, and the perceptions of fear and safety. Quantitative and ethnographic analyses were included in a mixed-methods approach to more fully test and explicate our findings. A total of 541 randomly sampled vacant lots were randomly assigned into treatment and control study arms; outcomes from police and 445 randomly sampled participants were analyzed over a 38-month study period. Participants living near treated vacant lots reported significantly reduced perceptions of crime (-36.8%, P < 0.05), vandalism (-39.3%, P < 0.05), and safety concerns when going outside their homes (-57.8%, P < 0.05), as well as significantly increased use of outside spaces for relaxing and socializing (75.7%, P < 0.01). Significant reductions in crime overall (-13.3%, P < 0.01), gun violence (-29.1%, P < 0.001), burglary (-21.9%, P < 0.001), and nuisances (-30.3%, P < 0.05) were also found after the treatment of vacant lots in neighborhoods below the poverty line. Blighted and vacant urban land affects people's perceptions of safety, and their actual, physical safety. Restoration of this land can be an effective and scalable infrastructure intervention for gun violence, crime, and fear in urban neighborhoods., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2018 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)

Background: This study investigates whether alcohol availability in state-run liquor stores affects crime nearby. In 2003, Pennsylvania repealed its Sunday alcohol-sales ban for a portion of its state-run liquor stores. We capitalize on this change in alcohol policy to assess the effect of alcohol availability on crime occurring within the vicinity of liquor stores that opened on Sundays in Philadelphia., Methods: We employed a difference-in-difference-in-differences model that compared reported crime before versus after the change in alcohol policy, Sundays versus other days of the week, and the fraction of liquor stores affected versus not affected by the repeal. We used crime incident data in Philadelphia between 1998 and 2011., Results: The repeal was associated with a significant increase in total and property-crime incidents occurring around Sunday-open state liquor stores in low-socioeconomic-status neighborhoods. We found no evidence of the displacement of crime to nearby areas., Conclusions: This is the first triple-difference alcohol study that attempts to isolate the micro-spatial effects of a shift in alcohol availability on local crime patterns, and shows that the repeal of Sunday alcohol-sales restrictions may increase crime in poor urban areas., (Copyright © 2016 by the Research Society on Alcoholism.)

Greening of vacant urban land may affect health and safety. The authors conducted a decade-long difference-in-differences analysis of the impact of a vacant lot greening program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on health and safety outcomes. "Before" and "after" outcome differences among treated vacant lots were compared with matched groups of control vacant lots that were eligible but did not receive treatment. Control lots from 2 eligibility pools were randomly selected and matched to treated lots at a 3:1 ratio by city section. Random-effects regression models were fitted, along with alternative models and robustness checks. Across 4 sections of Philadelphia, 4,436 vacant lots totaling over 7.8 million square feet (about 725,000 m(2)) were greened from 1999 to 2008. Regression-adjusted estimates showed that vacant lot greening was associated with consistent reductions in gun assaults across all 4 sections of the city (P < 0.001) and consistent reductions in vandalism in 1 section of the city (P < 0.001). Regression-adjusted estimates also showed that vacant lot greening was associated with residents' reporting less stress and more exercise in select sections of the city (P < 0.01). Once greened, vacant lots may reduce certain crimes and promote some aspects of health. Limitations of the current study are discussed. Community-based trials are warranted to further test these findings.

Objective: To examine whether business improvement districts (BID) contributed to greater than expected declines in the incidence of violent crimes in affected neighbourhoods., Method: A Bayesian hierarchical model was used to assess the changes in the incidence of violent crimes between 1994 and 2005 and the implementation of 30 BID in Los Angeles neighbourhoods., Results: The implementation of BID was associated with a 12% reduction in the incidence of robbery (95% posterior probability interval -2 to 24) and an 8% reduction in the total incidence of violent crimes (95% posterior probability interval -5 to 21). The strength of the effect of BID on robbery crimes varied by location., Conclusion: These findings indicate that the implementation of BID can reduce the incidence of violent crimes likely to result in injury to individuals. The findings also indicate that the establishment of a BID by itself is not a panacea, and highlight the importance of targeting BID efforts to crime prevention interventions that reduce violence exposure associated with criminal behaviours.

Understanding the progression of violent and nonviolent criminal activity remains a matter of theoretical debate. In the present study, the authors build on criminological theory and assess the extent to which the progression of violent and nonviolent criminal behaviors follows different trajectories. The authors rely on semiparametric mixture models to examine these comorbidities of offending in a longitudinal sample of delinquent adolescents. The results suggest that the trajectories of violent and nonviolent criminal offending follow similar paths over time and that membership in the chronic violent and nonviolent offender groups are associated with overlapping sets of risk factors. However, the results also indicate that at the individual level, membership in a particular nonviolent offending group does not share high concordance with membership in a particular violent offender group. These findings raise questions about the adequacy of general theories of crime progression and suggest the need to continue investigating behavioral theories that discriminate between different forms of offending. (Contains 3 figures, 8 tables, and 17 notes.)

Objectives: This study investigated the extent to which immigrant concentration is associated with reductions in neighborhood crime rates in the City of Los Angeles. Methods: A potential outcomes model using two-stage least squares regression was estimated, where immigrant concentration levels in 1990 were used as an instrumental variable to predict immigrant concentration levels in 2000. The instrumental variables design was used to reduce selection bias in estimating the effect of immigrant concentration on changes in official crime rates between 2000 and 2005 for 835 census tracts in the City of Los Angeles, holding constant other demographic variables and area-level fixed effects. Non-parametric smoothers were also employed in a two-stage least squares regression model to control for the potential influence of heterogeneity in immigrant concentration on changes in crime rates. Results: The results indicate that greater predicted concentrations of immigrants in neighborhoods are linked to significant reductions in crime. The results are robust to a number of different model specifications. Conclusions: The findings challenge traditional ecological perspectives that link immigrant settlement to higher rates of crime. Immigration settlement patterns appear to be associated with reducing the social burden of crime. Study conclusions are limited by the potential for omitted variables that may bias the observed relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood crime rates, and the use of only official crime data which may under report crimes committed against immigrants. Understanding whether immigrant concentration is an important dynamic of changing neighborhood patterns of crime outside Los Angeles will require replication with data from other U.S. cities.

Research Summary: This study examines the extent to which citywide racial and ethnic disparities in arrests are driven by a subset of places within cities. Data are drawn from six U.S. cities from 2014 to 2019. Results indicate that arrests are strongly concentrated within a few block groups, for all race and ethnicities in all cities. Coupled with higher rates of arrests for Blacks and (in some cities) Hispanics compared to Whites and other racial groups, this means that a few places in every city are responsible for driving citywide racial and ethnic disparities in arrests. These arrest hot spots demonstrate very high year‐to‐year stability. There is a strong relationship between crime and arrest hot spots, making crime hot spots key drivers of citywide racial and ethnic disparities in arrests. Policy Implications: Our results indicate that changes to arrest patterns in most parts of a city will have little impact on citywide racial and ethnic disparities in arrests. At the same time, an intense focus on reducing arrests in hot spots may yield outsized reductions in population‐level racial and ethnic disparities, while being especially feasible due to their limited scope. Place‐based and group‐based interventions at these locations may entail the dual benefit of reduced racial disparities in arrests along with enhanced public safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Place-based blight remediation programs have gained popularity in recent years as a crime reduction approach. This study estimated the impact of a citywide vacant lot greening program in Philadelphia on changes in crime over multiple years, and whether the effects were moderated by nearby land uses. Methods: The vacant lot greening program was assessed using quasi-experimental and experimental designs. Entropy distance weighting was used in the quasi-experimental analysis to match control lots to be comparable to greened lots on pre-existing crime trends. Fixed-effects difference-in-differences models were used to estimate the impact of the vacant lot greening program in quasi-experimental and experimental analyses. Results: Vacant lot greening was estimated to reduce total crime and multiple subcategories in both the quasi-experimental and experimental evaluations. Remediating vacant lots had a smaller effect on reducing crime when they were located nearby train stations and alcohol outlets. The crime reductions from vacant lot remediations were larger when they were located near areas of active businesses. There is some suggestive evidence that the effects of vacant lot greening are larger when located in neighborhoods with higher pre-intervention levels of social cohesion. Conclusions: The findings suggest that vacant lot greening provides a sustainable approach to reducing crime in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the effects may vary by different surrounding land uses. To better understand the mechanisms through which place-based blight remediation interventions reduce crime, future research should measure human activities and neighborly socialization in and around places before and after remediation efforts are implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study examines the impact of alcohol consumption in a Major League Baseball (MLB) stadium on area level counts of crime. The modal practice at MLB stadiums is to stop selling alcoholic beverages after the seventh inning. Baseball is not a timed game, so the duration between the last call for alcohol at the end of the seventh inning and the end of the game varies considerably, providing a unique natural experiment to estimate the relationship between alcohol consumption and crime near a stadium on game days. Methods: Crime data were obtained from Philadelphia for the period 2006–2015 and geocoded to the area around the MLB stadium as well as popular sports bars. We rely on difference-in-differences regression models to estimate the change in crime on home game days around the stadium as the game time extends into extra innings to other areas of the city and around sports bars in Philadelphia relative to days when the baseball team plays away from home. Results: When there are extra innings and more game-time after the seventh inning alcohol sales stoppage crime declines significantly around the stadium. The crime reduction benefit of the last call alcohol policy is undone when a complex of sports bars opens in the stadium parking lot in 2012. The results suggest that alcohol consumption during baseball games is a contributor to crime. Conclusions: The findings provide further support for environmental theories of crime that note the congregation of people in places with excessive alcohol consumption is a generator of violent crime in cities. The consumption of alcohol in MLB stadiums appears to increase crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence is a widespread problem that affects the physical, mental, and social health of individuals and communities. Violence comes with an immense economic cost to its victims and society at large. Although violence interventions have traditionally targeted individuals, changes to the built environment in places where violence occurs show promise as practical, sustainable, and high-impact preventive measures. This review examines studies that use quasi-experimental or experimental designs to compare violence outcomes for treatment and control groups before and after a change is implemented in the built environment. The most consistent evidence exists in the realm of housing and blight remediation of buildings and land. Some evidence suggests that reducing alcohol availability, improving street connectivity, and providing green housing environments can reduce violent crimes. Finally, studies suggest that neither transit changes nor school openings affect community violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecological impact of invasive tree pests is increasing worldwide. However, invasive tree pests may also have significant social costs. We investigated the association between the emerald ash borer (EAB)—an invasive tree pest first discovered in the US in 2002—and crime in Cincinnati, Ohio. We used a natural experimental approach, and compared crime (in 11 classes) on census block groups infested with EAB with crime on block groups not infested with EAB between 2005 and 2014. We accounted for demographic and biological differences between infested and un-infested block groups using propensity-score weighting. EAB infestation was significantly and positively associated with relative increases in crime in all but four crime categories. Our results suggest that invasive tree pests may be associated with social costs worth considering when managing invasive species. By extension, healthy trees may provide significant social benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New York Police Department (NYPD) under Operation Impact deployed extra police officers to high crime areas designated as impact zones. Officers were encouraged to conduct investigative stops in these areas. City officials credited the program as one of the leading causes of New York City’s low crime rate. We tested the effects of Operation Impact on reported crimes and arrests from 2004 to 2012 using a difference-in-differences approach. We used Poisson regression models to compare differences in crime and arrest counts before and after census block groups were designated as impact zones compared to census block groups in the same NYPD precincts but outside impact zones. Impact zones were significantly associated with reductions in total reported crimes, assaults, burglaries, drug violations, misdemeanor crimes, felony property crimes, robberies, and felony violent crimes. Impact zones were significantly associated with increases in total reported arrests, arrests for burglary, arrests for weapons, arrests for misdemeanor crimes, and arrests for property felony crimes. Impact zones were also significantly associated with increases in investigative stops for suspected crimes, but only the increase in stops made based on probable cause indicators of criminal behaviors were associated with crime reductions. The largest increase in investigative stops in impact zones was based on indicators of suspicious behavior that had no measurable effect on crime. The findings suggest that saturating high crime blocks with police helped reduce crime in New York City, but that the bulk of the investigative stops did not play an important role in the crime reductions. The findings indicate that crime reduction can be achieved with more focused investigative stops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research demonstrates that police reduce crime. We study this question by using a natural experiment in which a private university increased the number of police patrols within an arbitrarily defined geographic boundary. Capitalizing on the discontinuity in patrols at the boundary, we estimate that the extra police decreased crime in adjacent city blocks by 43-73%. Our results are consistent with findings from prior work that used other kinds of natural experiment. The paper demonstrates the utility of the geographic regression discontinuity design for estimating the effects of extra public or private services on a variety of outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether the relationship between unemployment and criminal offending depends on the type of crime analyzed. We rely on fixed-effects regression models to assess the association between changes in unemployment status and changes in violent crime, property crime, and driving under the influence (DUI) over a 6-year period. We also examine whether the type of unemployment benefit received moderates the link to criminal behavior. We find significantly positive effects of unemployment on property crime but not on other types of crime. Our estimates also suggest that unemployed young males commit less crime while participating in active labor market programs when compared with periods during which they receive standard unemployment benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of using law to change the built environment in ways that reduce opportunities to commit crimes has a long history. Unfortunately, this idea has received relatively little attention in the legal academy and only limited rigorous empirical scrutiny. In this Article, we review the considerable literature on the relationship between zoning, the built environment, and crime. We then report the results of two empirical studies on these relationships. First, we conducted a study of the effect of zoning on crime using 205 blocks selected in eight different relatively high crime neighborhoods in Los Angeles that have similar demographic characteristics but different forms of zoned land use. We find that mixed commercial- and residential-zoned areas are associated with lower crime than are commercial-only zoned areas. Second, we matched neighborhoods undergoing zoning changes between 2006 and 2010 with neighborhoods that underwent no zoning changes during this period but had similar preexisting crime trajectories between 1994 and 2005. The primary zoning change in these neighborhoods was to convert parcels to residential uses. We find that neighborhoods in which there was a zoning change experienced a significant decline in crime. Our results suggest that mixing residential-only zoning into commercial blocks may be a promising means of reducing crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crimes have many features, and the mix of those features can change over time and space. In this article, we introduce the concept of a crime regime to provide some theoretical leverage on collections of crime features and how the collections of features can change. Key tools include the use of principal components analysis to determine the dimensions of crime regimes, visualization methods to help reveal the role of time, summary statistics to quantify crime regime patterns, and permutation procedures to examine the role of chance. Our approach is used to analyze temporal and spatial crime patterns for the city of Los Angeles during an 8-year period. We focus on the number of violent crimes over time and their potential lethality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations for the increase in youth homicide in the mid-1980s and early 1990s focus predominantly on crack cocaine markets and related firearms effects. This study examines whether weakened social controls contributed to the escalation of youth homicide, independent of drug market effects. Specifically, the authors consider how city-level changes in social and economic disadvantage contributed to increases in race-specific youth homicide victimization. They find that structural factors played an important role in race- and age-specific youth homicide rates, independent of others factors, including drug arrests. City-level increases in social and economic disadvantage were positively associated with increases in Black teenage and young adult homicide rates and White teenage homicide rates. The implications of these findings for theories of homicide are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After reaching their highest levels of the 20th century, homicide rates in the United States declined precipitously in the early 1990s. This study examines a number of factors that might have contributed to both the sharp increase and decline in homicide rates. We use a pooled cross-sectional time series model to assess the relationship between changes in structural conditions and the change in homicide rates over four decennial time points (1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000). We assess the extent to which structural covariates associated with social, economic and political conditions commonly used in homicide research (e.g., urban decay, poverty, and the weakening of family and social bonds) are related to the change in homicide rates. Along with these classic covariates, we incorporate some contemporary explanations (e.g., imprisonment rates and drug trafficking) that have been proposed to address the recent decline in urban homicide rates. Our results indicate that both classic and contemporary explanations are related to homicide trends over the last three decades of the 20th century. Specifically, changes in resource deprivation and in the relative size of the youth population are associated with changes in the homicide rate across these time points. Increased imprisonment is also significantly related to homicide changes. These findings lead us to conclude that efforts to understand the changing nature of homicide will require serious consideration, if not integration, of classic and contemporary explanations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]