Virtual Criminology Colloquium Series: Maria Velez

Booming Economies and the Ethnoracial Divide in Violent Crime Change (1999 – 2013)
Criminologists have long recognized the importance of city economic conditions for neighborhood crime.  A large body of work traces increasing neighborhood crime, particularly for Black communities, to city experiences with deindustrialization and attendant social isolation and concentrated disadvantage.  Yet the economic landscape has changed in important ways with the rise of the new economy.  Indeed, some cities have been able to reverse the tide of deindustrialization by bringing in high wage jobs often from the tech industry.  Do growing city economies allow cities to respond in ways that counteract criminogenic neighborhood effects while cities with limited growth intensify vulnerabilities to neighborhood crime?  Moreover, do growing city economies alleviate or magnify ethnoracial inequality in neighborhood crime?  I explore these questions with the two waves of the National Neighborhood Crime Study which provides information on serious crime and a variety of socioeconomic conditions for two time points, circa 2000 and 2010.  Using multi-level models, preliminary analysis indicate that the decline in violent crime is less pronounced in Black versus White neighborhoods in cities that experienced significant economic growth.  In contrast and within these same cities, Latino neighborhoods experience more significant declines in violence than White and Black areas.  These findings demonstrate that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized by race are shaped meaningfully by city participation in the new economy.