Although illicit drug activity occurs within local communities, past quantitative research on drug markets and violent crime in the United States has been conducted mainly at the city level. The authors use neighborhood-level data from the city of Miami to test hypotheses regarding the effect of drug activity and traditional indicators of social disorganization on rates of aggravated assault and robbery. The results show that drug activity has robust effects on violent crime that are independent of other disorganization indicators. The authors also find that drug activity is concentrated in neighborhoods with low rates of immigration, less linguistic isolation and ethnic heterogeneity, and where nondrug accidental deaths are prevalent. The authors find no independent effect of neighborhood racial composition on drug activity or violent crime. The results suggest that future neighborhood-level research on social disorganization and violent crime should devote explicit attention to the disorganizing and violence-producing effects of illicit drug activity.
The current study examines the link between climate change and neighborhood levels of violence using 20 years of monthly climatic and crime data from St. Louis, MO, USA. St. Louis census tracts are aggregated in neighborhood groups of similar levels of social disadvantage, after which each group is subjected to time series analysis. Findings suggest that neighborhoods with higher levels of social disadvantage are very likely to experience higher levels of violence as a result of anomalously warm temperatures. The 20 % of most disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis, MO, USA are predicted to experience over half of the climate change-related increase in cases of violence. These results provide further evidence that the health impacts of climate change are proportionally higher among populations that are already at high risk and underscore the need to comprehensively address climate change.
This study estimates the predicted impact of climate change on levels of violence in a sample of 57 countries. We sample western and non-western countries and perform a multilevel ARFIMA regression to examine if warmer temperatures are associated with higher levels of homicide. Our results indicate that each degree Celsius increase in annual temperatures is associated with a nearly 6% average increase in homicides. Regional variation in this predicted effect is detected, for example, with no apparent effects in former Soviet countries and far stronger effects found in Africa. This variation indicates that climate change may acutely increase violence in areas that already are affected by higher levels of homicides and other social dislocations.
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