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The Neighborhood Context of Crime: A Longitudinal Examination Linking Voluntary Organizations, Voting Participation, and Crime

Abstract

A common approach to understanding neighborhood crime consists of cross-sectionally identifying structural and ecological correlates of crime, which often ignores the dynamic nature of neighborhoods, including the mechanisms that may link neighborhood factors to crime, and how crime can have critical feedback effects on its antecedents. Rather than adopting this “risk-factor” approach to neighborhood crime, this study employed a dynamic approach that longitudinally modeled the interdependency between the organizational base of neighborhoods, residents’ informal social control capability, and neighborhood crime. This provided the opportunity to determine what neighborhood characteristics (directly and indirectly) influence neighborhood crime over time, how neighborhood crime influences social organization over time, and how neighborhood effects on crime vary based on the level of certain structural characteristics.

This study specifically examined a large sample of neighborhoods in California from 2000 to 2010 using secondary data from California police departments, the National Center for Charitable Statistics, the California Statewide database, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Two series of models were estimated using longitudinal structural equation modeling. The first series of models—cross-lagged panel models—determine what predicts change in voluntary organizations, voting participation, and neighborhood crime, simultaneously. The second series of models examine whether the effects that voting participation and voluntary organizations, respectively, have on crime rates differ based on the level of certain structural characteristics. The results indicate that voting participation (a measure of neighborhoods’ capacity for action) directly reduces neighborhood crime over time. However, this capacity for action (in relation to crime) appears to be most efficacious in neighborhoods of socioeconomic advantage. On the other hand, there is evidence that crime decreases neighborhoods’ capacity for action, which then increases crime later. Furthermore, voluntary organizations were found to directly increase neighborhood crime over time, and this finding is mainly attributed to neighborhoods with many voluntary organizations and high population density.

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