Concentrated Poverty Increased in Both Rural and Urban Areas Since 2000, Reversing Declines in the 1990s

In this brief, authors Brian Thiede, Hyojung Kim, and Matthew Valasik discuss changes in poverty levels among U.S. counties using data from the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census and the 2005–2009 and 2011-2015 American Community Surveys. They report that the share of rural counties with high poverty rates (20 percent or more) increased from 20.6 percent in 2000 to 32.5 percent in the aggregate 2011–2015 data, and the share of high-poverty urban counties increased from 6.7 to 15.6 percent. The share of the population living in these high-poverty counties nearly doubled in both rural and urban areas during this period. Substantial increases in concentrated poverty occurred in rural areas both before and after the Great Recession, but increases in urban areas primarily occurred in years during and after the downturn. In rural areas, increases in concentrated poverty were greatest among micropolitan counties with small cities, which had historically been characterized by lower poverty rates than more sparsely populated and isolated areas. Increases in the population exposed to concentrated poverty were greater among the rural non-Hispanic white and black populations than among rural Hispanics. The authors conclude that the overall resurgence of concentrated poverty since 2000 should be of concern to policy makers and other stakeholders since areas with very high poverty rates face many social, economic, and health challenges

The Alt-Right Movement and National Security

Identifying the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol as an inflection point, this article analyzes the historical relationship between White supremacy and the US military from Reconstruction after the Civil War to the present. The article posits causes for the disproportionate number of current and former members of the military associated with White power groups and proposes steps the Department of Defense can take to combat the problems posed by the association of the US military with these groups

A Penalized Likelihood Method for Balancing Accuracy and Fairness in Predictive Policing

Racial bias of predictive policing algorithms has been the focus of recent research and, in the case of Hawkes processes, feedback loops are possible where biased arrests are amplified through self-excitation, leading to hotspot formation and further arrests of minority populations. In this article we develop a penalized likelihood approach for introducing fairness into point process models of crime. In particular, we add a penalty term to the likelihood function that encourages the amount of police patrol received by each of several demographic groups to be proportional to the representation of that group in the total population. We apply our model to historical crime incident data in Indianapolis and measure the fairness and accuracy of the two approaches across several crime categories. We show that fairness can be introduced into point process models of crime so that patrol levels proportionally match demographics, though at a cost of reduced accuracy of the algorithms

Rape Myths and Hookup Culture: An Exploratory Study of U.S. College Students\u27 Perceptions

The present study provides the first known systematic examination of the association of hookup culture endorsement and rape myth acceptance. Multivariate regression analysis was conducted to test the primary hypothesis that hookup culture endorsement would be the primary predictor of rape myth acceptance levels among a sample of 422 U.S. college students. Findings indicated the existence of a complex relationship in which rape myth acceptance increases or decreases based upon the form of hookup culture endorsement examined. Beliefs that hookups are harmless and elevate social status increased rape myth acceptance, whereas beliefs that hookups express sexual freedom decreased rape myth acceptance. Furthermore, results supported the hypothesis that hookup culture endorsement was the largest predictor of rape myth acceptance. Consistent with previous studies, the predictive power of gender and religiosity in determining levels of rape myth acceptance were shown to be significant. When controlling for levels of hookup culture endorsement, the explanatory power of these variables decreased, and hookup culture endorsement had the largest effect upon rape myth acceptance levels

"Saving the World, One Neighborhood at a Time": The Role of Civil Gang Injunctions at Influencing Gang Behavior

While violence across the United States has declined dramatically over the past two decades, gang-related crimes remain at unacceptably high rates, especially within the city of Los Angeles, America's gang capital. Gang-related crimes generally involve groups of individuals and have a strong territorial component, lending themselves to geographically targeted interventions. A strategy that has charmed law enforcement agencies with its ability to take advantage of both the social and spatial features of a gang is the civil gang injunction (CGI). Essentially, a CGI is a tailored restraining order against a gang, prohibiting its members from engaging in specific nuisance behaviors within a demarcated geographical region, termed a "safety-zone." Evaluations suggest that CGIs are effective at reducing serious crime and residents' fears; yet, CGIs remain a time-consuming and costly strategy with an unstudied mechanism for why they work. Do CGIs influence how gang members associate and where they hangout? And, more importantly, how do CGIs contribute to changes in gang violence?Using the framework of routine activities theory, this dissertation focuses on the relationship between CGIs, gang members' patterns of association and lethal violence. To address these questions I utilize two unique datasets: homicide case files and field identification (FI) cards gathered from the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department. My first chapter utilizes social network and spatial analyses to investigate the patterns of association among enjoined gang members at the individual- and group-level. I examine both the characteristics of enjoined gangs' social networks, ascertaining their influence in disrupting social ties, as well as examining the geographic characteristics of FIs to discern if enjoined gangs have changed the spatial patterns of their associations. My second chapter looks at both the homicide trends over the last decade and the disparities between non-gang and gang homicides, both enjoined and non-enjoined, to consider how CGIs influence the characteristics of violence. Lastly, in my third chapter I construct a turf-based spatial typology of gang homicide to investigate the impact that CGIs have on the mobility patterns of participants involved in gang-related homicides. If CGIs influence gangs' spatial patterns of association by discouraging members from congregating in public, then a CGI in theory shifts members' activity and travel patterns, suggesting that gang homicides involving enjoined gang members would experience a different mobility pattern than gang homicides involving only non-enjoined gang members.Results from this dissertation indicate that CGIs are able to influence the patterns of association of individual gang members, particularly in the short-run. Conversely, at the group-level, enjoined gangs do not always respond as predicted by the rational of a CGI, with a gang's social network either being disrupted, with members' social ties losing connectedness, or a gang's social network converges, with members' social ties increasing in connectedness. It also appears that while CGIs are able to dislodge enjoined members from their gang's hangouts, a CGI actually constrains the overall mobility of enjoined gang members, reducing the likelihood that enjoined gang members are venturing outside of their gang's claimed turf. In relation to influencing the overall patterns of gang violence, the findings suggest that CGIs could be shifting enjoined gang homicides away from the street and into less public spaces, along with involving fewer suspects and victims. Results also indicate that the presence of CGIs in Hollenbeck has impacted the mobility patterns of participants who are involved in a gang homicide. Specifically, an increase in internal gang homicides and a reduction in predatory gang homicides were observed in the data. These findings are consistent with earlier results indicating that the mobility of an enjoined gang member is restricted by the presence of a CGI. Overall, the goal of this dissertation is to provide both scholars and criminal justice professionals with a better understanding of CGIs, and ascertain if they are an appropriate strategy to disrupt a gang's patterns of association and diminish their opportunities to participate in violent acts

East Side Story: Disaggregating Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles

This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted history of intergenerational Latinx gangs with local neighborhood residents viewing them as a fundamental social problem. Hollenbeck has over 30 active street gangs, each claiming a geographically defined territory, many of which have remained stable during the study period. Over twenty years (1990–2012) of homicide data collected from Hollenbeck’s Homicide Division are utilized to create an empirically rigorous typology of homicide incidents and to test whether or not gang homicides are sufficiently distinct in nature to be a unique category in the latent class analysis

Policing the progressive city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement

This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how historically embedded local politics shape the varied styles and structures of policing that result in racially discriminatory enforcement patterns. Our goal is to begin sketching out a robust framework of ‘place’ as an orientation for examining discretionary local policing practices, especially as they impact marginalized groups and communities of color

Does Predictive Policing Lead to Biased Arrests? Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial

Racial bias in predictive policing algorithms has been the focus of a number of recent news articles, statements of concern by several national organizations (e.g., the ACLU and NAACP), and simulation-based research. There is reasonable concern that predictive algorithms encourage directed police patrols to target minority communities with discriminatory consequences for minority individuals. However, to date there have been no empirical studies on the bias of predictive algorithms used for police patrol. Here, we test for such biases using arrest data from the Los Angeles predictive policing experiments. We find that there were no significant differences in the proportion of arrests by racial-ethnic group between control and treatment conditions. We find that the total numbers of arrests at the division level declined or remained unchanged during predictive policing deployments. Arrests were numerically higher at the algorithmically predicted locations. When adjusted for the higher overall crime rate at algorithmically predicted locations, however, arrests were lower or unchanged