Is Crime Higher Around Drug-Gang Street Corners?: Two Spatial Approaches To The Relationship Between Gang Set Spaces And Local Crime Levels

Environmental criminologists are at the vanguard of a growing interest in establishing the density or intensity of crime events around locations that are the target of crime prevention activities. The traditional approach has often been to count the number of crime events within a certain distance of the target site; however, this approach is fraught with methodological concerns. In this article, we examine the benefits of two different approaches to this problem by estimating the intensity of property and violent crime around drug corners associated with different drug-gangs. The first technique allows for better estimation of crime in the vicinity of gang corners by using an inverse distance weighting approach to crime events around. A second methodology, using Thiessen polygons, allows a statistical test to determine the difference between non-gang, gang, and multi-gang corner locations. Findings indicate that single-gang dominated corners have significantly more crime than non-gang corners, and variation in the crime level in the vicinity of gang corners was found for different gangs. Corners characterized by the presence of multiple gangs have significantly more crime than single-gang locations.