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ASSESSING SPILLOVER EFFECTS OF DRUG MARKETS ON GUN VIOLENCE ACROSS A NETWORK OF NEIGHBORHOODS
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2024-05
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Criminal Justice
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10576
Abstract
Given the significant burden that gun violence places on individuals and communities, it is important to understand the factors that produce differential rates of gun violence across communities. One robust predictor of city- and neighborhood-rates of gun violence has been drug market activity. Mounting evidence suggests that not only are drug markets criminogenic places themselves, they produce spillovers of violence into spatially proximate areas as well. Yet it is still unknown whether there is a more general spillover effect of drug markets that affects neighborhoods that are spatially distant. This dissertation fills this critical gap by examining the influence of drug market activity on gun violence across a “network of neighborhoods” in Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. Using large-scale cellphone data on resident mobility patterns, this study creates a mobility-based network of urban neighborhoods representing census tracts that are linked by where their residents visited throughout the course of several months (year-quarters). Set within a social disorganization and environmental criminology framework, this study uses tract-level data on shootings, drug arrests, sociostructural characteristics, business and transit locations, and cell-phone based mobility to answer a series of research questions. The primary research questions addressed in this dissertation examine whether drug market activity in network neighbors contributes to elevated gun violence in local neighborhoods. To answer these questions, a series of network lag models are run predicting the net effect of mobility network-lagged drug market activity on local gun violence rates. A secondary research question is related to an exploration of the mobility-based network of neighborhoods in each city. Descriptive analyses are conducted on the resident routine mobility networks to answer this question. Results from this dissertation will add to the literature concerning the drug market-violence link, and the spatial patterning of violence in cities more generally. Using cellphone data capturing resident mobility to connect neighborhoods will also add to the literature on neighborhood networks, and provide insight into whether examining neighborhoods connected by the routine mobility of city residents is useful in explaining the spillover of drug market activity on gun violence in spatially close and distant neighborhoods.
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