- Crime in Metropolitan America: Patterns and Trends across the Southern California Landscape
Abstract: This project involves collecting and combining data from a large number of sources (e.g. crime data, land use data, parolee data, business and employment data, etc.) to study crime and crime trends across three metropolitan areas (six counties) in Southern California. This wide array of information will allow accounting for the multi-dimensional and inter-related sources of crime and crime trends in Southern California at different units of analysis including blocks, neighborhoods, and cities. Using these data, we will: 1) build a model to predict crime in small geographic areas; 2) model the change in crime in cities over a 50-year period; 3) assess the effect of neighborhood organizations and institutions on crime trends; 4) determine the effect of the spatial distribution of poverty (at both small and large scales) on crime rates; 5) examine the effect of gentrification on crime in neighborhoods and nearby neighborhoods; 6) assess the effect of foreclosures and vacancies on neighborhood home values and crime over time; 7) consider the relationship between immigration and crime, taking into account the neighborhood institutional context; 8) assess how the clustering of social problems in a neighborhood (including the presence of parolees) affects neighborhood crime over time. This project builds on prior work done by the Metropolitan Futures Initiative (MFI) team to locate various data sources in Southern California.
This project is funded by the National Institute of Justice ($560,620).