Social Network Analysis

1. The recent rise and fall of American violence 2. Some recent trends in US violence 3. Guns and gun violence 4. The limited importance of prison expansion 5. Patterns in adult homicide 6. The rise and decline of hard drugs, drug markets, and violence in inner-city New York 7. Have changes in policing reduced violent crime 8. An economic model of recent trends in violence 9. Demographics and US Homicide.

The Crime Drop in America

Recent judgments in the Court of Appeal have highlighted the significance of battered woman syndrome. This article describes the origin and features of the syndrome and some of its shortcomings. Medical aspects and legal applications of the concept are discussed. Language: en

Battered woman syndrome.

textabstractIn Dutch: Naar een Nieuwe Wereldeconomie: voorstellen voor een internationaal economisch beleid, Rotterdam University Press, Rotterdam, 1965, XV + 335 p.\nIn Spanish: Hacia Una Economia Mundial: sugerencias para una politica economica internacional, Series Biblioteca de Economia No.7, Orbis, Barcelona, 1985, 242 p.

Shaping the World Economy. Suggestions for an International Economic Policy. By Jan Tinbergen. New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1962. pp. xvii, 330. Index. 4.00, cloth.

Hidden wholesale: The drug diffusing capacity of online drug cryptomarkets

This paper uses transportation data to estimate how daily spatio-temporal shifts in population influence the distribution of crime over a city’s census tracts (CTs). A “funnel hypothesis” states that these daily flows are central for crime concentrations within a city. We present arguments for and against funneling prior to empirical analysis. A municipal transport agency in a large city in Eastern Canada surveyed 66,100 households about daily trips for work, shopping, recreation, and school. This allowed us to link inflows of visitors to numbers of property and violent crimes for 506 CTs. We find strong support for a funneling effect. Daily visitors have a major impact on distributions over this city for both violent and property crimes. Daily spatio-temporal shifts could be significantly more important than fixed residential factors for distributing crime over urban space.

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Daily crime flows within a city

To disaggregate the crime impact of visitor inflows. There is increasing evidence that visitors can make a major contribution to levels of crime in a given neighbourhood: crimes by visiting offenders may add to those committed by local offenders, while visitors (and their property) may provide local offenders with additional opportunities for crime. Using police-recorded crime data for a large Eastern Canadian city we determined whether individuals charged or chargeable for property and violent crimes were visitors or residents of census tracts (CT) where crimes had been committed. This information was combined with data from a large transportation survey, allowing us to estimate daily population flows into each CT for four purposes (work, shopping, recreation, and education). Negative binomial regression models including spatial lags were used. An increase in visitor inflow not only increases the number of visitors charged with crimes but also the number of local residents charged. These effects vary significantly by visit purpose: more infractions are committed in tracts where visits are for recreation and, to a lesser extent, for shopping. Findings for work and education are mixed. One important implication of our results is that, because most studies of aggregate crime counts or rates fail to account for whether crimes have been committed by visitors or residents, previous research may have provided hasty, partial, or even erroneous explanations for crime concentrations.

Crimes by Visitors Versus Crimes by Residents: The Influence of Visitor Inflows

Footage from body-worn cameras (BWCs) is sometimes used to assess the quality of police interventions. This study investigates whether there is a “body-worn camera perspective bias,” in which the point of view provided by the footage influences perception of an intervention. Participants with different backgrounds (undergraduate students and police candidates) were randomly allocated to a group that looked at one of two videos showing a fictional police intervention during which lethal force was used against a subject; both videos showed exactly the same intervention, but one had been filmed with a BWC and the other with a surveillance camera installed in a top corner of the room. Participants were then asked to rate the appropriateness of the intervention. No camera perspective bias was found among university respondents. However a significant camera perspective bias was found among police candidates: respondents’ opinions on the appropriateness of the intervention were significantly different when the film was from the body-worn camera than when it was seen from the surveillance camera. This result may be explained by the finding that viewers of the BWC footage reported that the subject was further from the officer. Results suggest that the more training individuals have in analyzing police interventions, the more affected they will be by the camera perspective in these interventions. One implication of these results is that the perspective of people assigned and trained to evaluate the appropriateness of an intervention (e.g., members of a committee monitoring police misconduct) might be biased if only video footage from a BWC is presented.

Rémi Boivin

Papers

Daily crime flows within a city

Crimes by Visitors Versus Crimes by Residents: The Influence of Visitor Inflows

The body-worn camera perspective bias

Risks, prices, and positions: A social network analysis of illegal drug trafficking in the world-economy

Introduction to the special issue on Crime and Networks