A Tale of Two Border Cities: Community Context, Ethnicity, and Homicide^*

Abstract

Objective. Using Poisson-based negative binomial regression, we estimate the effect of neighborhood factors on homicides in two cities (San Antonio, Texas and San Diego, California) that have large Mexican-origin populations. Methods. Three independent data sources (official homicide police reports, medical examiner records, and the U.S. Census) are used to construct the dependent homicide, and independent neighborhood, variables. Census tracts represent the unit of analysis, which serve as a proxy for neighborhoods. Given the spatial nature of the data, spatial estimation procedures were also modeled. Results. Spatial proximity to violence, neighborhood disadvantage, and affluence (in San Antonio) consistently buffered homicide across neighborhoods, even in heavily populated Latino neighborhoods. Conclusions. Spatial embeddedness and neighborhood characteristics are important for improving our understanding about ethnic neighborhood variations in levels of violence. Comparative approaches across places, namely, Latinodominated cities, can yield considerable insight into how the local context intersects race/ethnicity and violent crime.A considerable amount of recent research has focused on race-specific violent crime rates at different levels of aggregation (Peterson and Krivo, 2005). These studies have shown support for the importance of estimating the effects of social and economic factors on homicide (see LaFree, O'Brien, and Baumer, 2006;Wadsworth and Kubrin, 2004). Not surprisingly, these studies consistently find that measures of economic disadvantage are a strong predictor of violent crime across white and black locales. Researchers now n Direct correspondence to Ramiro Martinez, Jr.,

Constructing crime: Neighborhood characteristics and police recording behavior

“…Despite such acculturation, there are indications that San Antonio's Latino neighborhoods demonstrate characteristics consistent with social disorganization. Latino neighborhoods exhibit higher concentrations of poor female-headed households and individuals who receive public assistance and/or are unemployed (Martinez, Stowell, & Cancino, 2008). Allen and Turner (2005) reported 78 percent of the Latino population is concentrated in certain residential areas.…”

The Immigration-Crime Myth: Exploring the Impact of Immigration on Neighbourhood Violence

“…Several studies in the United States have used a comparable measure to tap into the presence of immigrants (see for example Feldmeyer and Steffensmeir, 2009;Lee et al, 2001;Martinez et al, 2008;Martinez et al, 2010;Wadsworth, 2010) -although percent Latino is also common (Feldmeyer, 2009;Harris & Feldmeyer, 2013;Light, 2017 Disadvantage: Social disorganisation theory predicts disadvantaged neighbourhoods will encounter higher rates of crime. Extensive studies reveal that socio-economic disadvantage is a consistent and strong predictor of neighbourhood violence (Bursik & Grasmick, 1993;Krivo & Peterson, 1996;Lee et al, 2001;Sampson, Morenoff & Raudenbush, 2005).…”

“…Most research to date relies on a single measure of immigrant concentration -most commonly the percent foreign born/ recently arrived in an area (Feldmeyer and Steffensmeir, 2009;Lee et al, 2001;Martinez et al, 2008;Martinez et al, 2010;Wadsworth, 2010) or the percent Latino (Feldmeyer, 2009;Harris & Feldmeyer, 2013;Light, 2017). Alternatively, some studies construct an immigration index by combining several measures into one (for example, percent foreign born, percent Latino and percent linguistically isolated) ).…”

“…In the United States, studies have employed everything from micro places like census block groups (Alaniz et al, 1998), to meso-level constructs like census tracts (Kubrin & Ishizawa, 2012;Martinez et al, 2010;Martinez et al, 2008;Nielsen et al, 2005;Nielsen & Martinez, 2009) through to macro level places such as metropolitan areas (Reid et al, 2005), census places 11 (Feldmeyer, 2009;Feldmeyer & 10 All religious institutions and schools located by searching the yellow pages online directory and google maps. Counts reflect listed businesses in March 2017.…”

“…Rather than dichotomising neighbourhoods as new and established (see for example Harris & Feldmeyer, 2013;Light, 2017;Painter-Davis, 2015) Study 2 progresses international immigration-crime scholarship in two important ways: first, by considering the potential for group specific effects and second, by assessing both concentration and diversity effects. The immigration-crime literature to date, has largely focused on broad measures of total/recent immigrant concentration (see for example Feldmeyer and Steffensmeir, 2009;Lee et al, 2001;Martinez et al, 2008;Martinez et al, 2010;Wadsworth, 2010) or more focused measures of percent Latino/Hispanic/Mexican (see for example Feldmeyer, 2009;Harris & Feldmeyer, 2013;Light, 2017) -with other groups often ignored (see for exception Kubrin et al, 2016). However, immigrants do not represent a monolithic group.…”