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Cross-sectional scholarship demonstrates the importance of the U.S. racial structure in precipitating dramatic racial divisions in serious crime across neighborhoods. Yet, we know much less about the degree and sources of racial disparities in how neighborhood crime changes over time, despite considerable evolution in the components of the racial order. We articulate a dynamic racial structural perspective that centers the unfolding nature of residential segregation in producing and altering racially structured socioeconomic realities. We contend that these racialized structural inequalities, in turn, lead neighborhoods on unequal paths of crime change. We assess this perspective with new panel data (circa 2000 and 2010) from the National Neighborhood Crime Study for 7,875 census tracts across 75 cities. Despite considerable socioeconomic upheaval and demographic change during the first decade of the 2000s, we find substantial disparities in neighborhood violence and burglary change that indicate the reproduction of the ethno-racial divide. Furthermore, our dynamic racial structural model explains much of these inequalities in crime change. A dynamic racial structure perspective lays a foundation for understanding the consequences of the evolving U.S. racial structure for unequal exposure to crime across neighborhoods over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the prior article in this volume, Robert Sampson and colleagues (2018) take theoretical and empirical stock of a framework they presented twenty years ago. They find broad empirical support for its core tenets. Differences in disadvantage explain most, if not all, observed gaps in violent crime between Black and White neighborhoods; disadvantage also operates similarly to foster crime in Black and White areas. The authors also lament the limited research on the key intervening mechanism of community social organization, particularly its cultural and political sources, that links disadvantage to crime. I have two primary goals in commenting on this article. First, in keeping with their assessment, I provide my take on their agenda for extending the framework beyond the Black-White divide, giving greater attention to the political sources of community social organization, and considering reciprocal relationships between crime, race, and disadvantage. Second, I elaborate on how my views differ from Sampson and colleagues’ regarding strategies to empirically validate the racial invariance thesis, the breadth of support for the thesis beyond its core tenets, and the role of culture. I provide these critiques to encourage further work exploring the explanatory power of Sampson and colleagues’ thesis, and, to thereby foster a better understanding of enduring inequities in violent crime between racialized minority populations and Whites. Without their ecologically-based approach, we run the risk of essentializing minorities as criminogenic, like recent work espousing cultural (devoid of structural) and biological (devoid of social) explanations for the race-crime link. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant advances in the study of neighborhoods and crime, criminologists have paid surprisingly less attention to the extralocal forces that shape violence. To address this issue, we draw on an emerging body of work that stresses the role of home mortgage lending-a resource secured via interaction with external actors-in reducing neighborhood violence and extend it by addressing concerns that the lending-violence relationship is spurious and confounded by simultaneity. We explore the longitudinal relationship between residential mortgage lending and violence in Seattle with a pooled time series of 118 census tracts over 27 years, and we instrument our endogenous predictors (home mortgage lending and violent crime) with changes in their levels from prior periods. Employing Arellano-Bond difference models, we assess both the effect of mortgage lending on violent crime as well as the effect of violent crime levels on mortgage activity. We find that infusions of home mortgage lending yield reductions in subsequent violent crime; yet the impact of violent crime on subsequent lending is not significant. Results underscore the importance of incorporating external forces such as home mortgage lending into explanations of neighborhood violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage have heightened levels of crime, and since the 1980s they have seen an infusion of immigrants. The article suggests that the influx of recent immigrants should contribute to the revitalization of disadvantaged neighborhoods and thereby help to reduce violent crime. The article tests whether the effect of concentrated disadvantage on local homicide levels is attenuated by levels of recent arrivals (1985-1990). The article find that recently arrived immigrants are associated with reductions of lethal violence in disadvantaged neighborhoods. It suggest that the influx of recent immigrants in disadvantaged neighborhoods reinvigorates local economic opportunity structures and social networks, and revitalizes neighborhood organizations and institutions. However, recently arrived immigrants are associated with increases in local homicide levels in advantaged contexts. Recent immigrants appear to elevate homicide via the potential disruption they cause in local social networks and efforts at community social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces public social control into multilevel victimization research by investigating its impact on household and personal victimization risk for residents across 60 urban neighborhoods. Public social control refers to the ability of neighborhoods to secure external resources necessary for the reduction of crime and victimization. I find that living in neighborhoods with high levels of public social control reduces an individual's likelihood of victimization, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Given the important role that residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods can play in securing public social control, this contingent finding suggests that disadvantaged neighborhoods can be politically viable contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]