Tag Archives: crime

Undergraduates discovering positive deviance

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While we might typically consider deviance to be negative, an activity in one sociology class illustrates how deviance can also be positive:

“Can I pay for her drink, too?” asked Caitlin Hendricks.

Peterson was pleasantly surprised but still taken aback; she and Hendricks didn’t know each other…

Hendricks’ random act of kindness wasn’t entirely random: She was completing an assignment for sociology professor Michelle Inderbitzin’s deviant behavior and social control class at OSU, which studies the concept of social deviance and how it can vary based on history and context.

Inderbitzin has assigned the “positive deviance” exercise in her social deviance class at OSU for six years. She asks students to simply do something nice for a stranger — bag someone else’s groceries, for example, or hold an umbrella over someone’s head while it’s raining. Students then write a page-long recap of their experience, focusing on the recipient’s reactions as well as their own feelings before and after the act and discuss their experience in class.

This is a good reminder about positive deviance that might lead to the world of Pay It Forward in popular culture but can be examined more closely sociologically. This reminds me of the ideas of Emile Durkheim who thought deviance could help reinforce existing norms. By seeing people break norms and then experience the consequences, others are reminded of the norms. At the same time, it seems that most sociologists have focused on the creation of or breaking of social norms. For example, Robert Merton’s strain theory describes how when people are faced with anomie, they respond in different ways including breaking norms.

It is interesting to think about why we as a society tend to focus on negative deviance more than positive deviance. Perhaps it is tied to findings that show we experience loss more deeply than gain. Perhaps it is because we have media sources that tend to lead with crime (and presumably they do this because it brings an audience). Perhaps it is because some argue we have a violent, individualistic culture. Simply throwing in a few positive stories on the nightly news may not be enough to overcome society’s emphasis on negative deviance.

Predicting and preventing burglaries though statistical models in Indio, California

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In January 2011, I wrote about how Santa Clara, California was going to use statistical models to predict where crime would take place and then deploy police accordingly. Another California community, Indio, is going down a similar route to reduce burglaries:

The Indio Police Department with the help of a college professor and a wealth of data and analysis is working on just that — predicting where certain burglaries will occur.The goal is to stop them from happening through effective deployment or preventative measures…

The police department began the Smart Policing Initiative a year ago with $220,617 in federal funding from the U.S. Department of Justice…

Robert Nash Parker, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside and an expert on crime, is working with Indio.

On Friday, he shared his methodology for tracking truancy and burglary rates.

He used data from the police department, school district, U.S Census Bureau and probation departments, to create a model that can be used to predict such daytime burglaries.

Nash said that based on the data, truancy seems to lead to burglary hot spots.

A few issues come to mind:

1. Could criminals simply change up their patterns once they know about this program?

2. Do approaches like this simply treat the symptoms rather than the larger issues, in this case, truancy? It is a good thing to prevent crimes or arrest people quickly but what about working to limit the potential for crime in the first place?

3. I wonder how much data is required for this to work and how responsive it is to changes in the data.

4. Since this is being funded by a federal agency, can we expect larger roll-outs in the future? Think of this approach versus that of a big city like Chicago where there has been a greater emphasis on the use of cameras.

Should you worry about your pacemaker, baby monitor, or garage door opener being hacked?

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I ran across a story about five common objects that can be hacked: a pacemaker, baby monitor, automobile, garage door opener, and brain.

Here is my problem with this story: it doesn’t give you any indication about how serious these problems are. Perhaps this is simply meant to be informational: certain common devices can be hacked. But the tone of the article goes beyond this and suggests that mischief can take place and people should replace older items that are easier to be hacked. Here is the question that really should be asked: how likely is it that any of these items will be hacked? Should people with pacemakers really be worried? What is the relative risk of paying less for an unencrypted baby monitor?

Without this information, this article fits a similar narrative of crime stories where readers assume or develop the idea that these are common occurrences when they really are not.

From gang member to sociologist

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A sociologist tells how he journeyed from being a gang member to obtaining a PhD in sociology:

As a doctoral candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Rios spent three years shadowing 40 youths between the ages of 14 and 17, a lot of whom had arrest records and gang affiliations. He had plenty of opportunity to learn that many police officers had a poor opinion of any efforts to understand inner-city youths. The police were instead part of a system that kept the boys under constant surveillance, criminalized their even relatively benign behavior, and left them demoralized and angry, Rios argues in a new book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York University Press).

When police officers demanded to know what he was doing, Rios knew the routine: Be deferential, even when abusively spoken to. He had grown up on those Oakland streets and he knew the costs of stepping out of line. One day, when he was 14, an officer “stomped my face against the ground with his thick, black, military-grade rubber boot,” he writes.

Rios, now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was no angel when that happened. He had just been pulled over in a car he had stolen. He had joined a gang at 13, lured by the promise of protection in Oakland’s drug-riddled, gang-controlled neighborhoods. Soon he was dealing drugs. He was witnessing beatings, knifings, and murders. He served a string of juvenile-detention sentences. And he would soon see his best friend, Smiley, killed by a rival gang member, a bullet to his head.

How Rios, now 33, came to escape that life, and earn a Ph.D., is one striking narrative in Punished. Another is his account of the dissertation research that took him back to the neighborhoods where he grew up. Starting in 2002, he wandered the streets with his subjects at all times of day and night. He saw the jeopardy that defined their lives. And he met their families, their probation officers, and the police officers who constantly monitored them. The boys’ encounters with the police were almost always negative.

It sounds like Rios could have some unusual insights into gangs and policing from his experiences. It also sounds like there are some interesting methodological issues here as Rios was familiar with what he was studying: on one hand, this likely allowed him to understand certain things in ways that outsiders could not but on the other hand, he was warned about “going native.”

I also like how he flips the script with this remark:

Over lunch at the beachside faculty club on the Santa Barbara campus, where a whole academic lifetime seems indisputably safer than one day in gang territory, he says: “A great research question would be: Why not more violence? Why aren’t these kids attacking everyday people? Why are they only attacking themselves?” Knowing the answers, “we might get a little closer to finding ways to implement policies that will allow communities to bring in their own controls relating to group violence.”

This goes against many media portrayals of violence which seems to focus on how violence affects law-abiding (and wealthier?) citizens. I also ask my Intro to Sociology class to think about social order in this way: instead of thinking of why people are deviant at times, why not ask why many/most people are not deviant most of the time?

Additionally, is this growing evidence (along with this) that sociologists are more interested in including more biographical information in their work?

Gangs in the suburbs

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Suburbanites often dream that they have escaped or avoided the problems of the big city. But some of these issues are no longer just big city problems: gangs have been in the suburbs for some time now.

Gangs, once a threat confined to city streets, began expanding outward two decades ago. Now, suburban and rural communities are the center of a significant and growing gang problem, according to the 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment report.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation found that nearly all communities surrounding Nashville have gang activity, including the traditional suburbs of Nashville, such as those around Hickory Hollow Mall, and small towns in Williamson, Rutherford, Sumner and Wilson counties.

These smaller, residential communities offer fresh territory for selling drugs and that increases the gang’s revenue.

“There’s money out in the suburbs,” said Mike Carlie, criminology and sociology professor at Missouri State University. “There are people in the suburbs that want drugs.”

Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, I can recall when local law enforcement and other officials started talking about gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was something that people in the community weren’t completely prepared for and that threatened the idyllic suburban lifestyle.

I haven’t read much research about suburban gang activity, particularly beyond inner-ring suburbs and in more affluent communities. I would be interested to know how it affects average suburban residents and civic organizations: are they willing to combat the problem and deal with some larger social issues or would they prefer to throw the book at gang members or would they move to further out or more affluent suburbs that don’t have a perceived gang problem?

One of my favorite scenes from Gang Leader for a Day involved the gang leaders meeting at a large suburban house to talk business. While the gang business, mainly involving poor neighborhoods in Chicago, was taking place, their kids were swimming in the pool and acting out the suburban lifestyle. What did the neighbors think? Even a more realistic show like The Wire is set in a place where the public would expect gang activity: run-down areas of Baltimore. Why not put together another show that takes gangs to the suburbs?This would perhaps be too scary for many Americans to consider.

“The most closely studied troublemakers in history”

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See this story for how a large study of Boston’s youths begun in 1939 sheds light on the recent arrest of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger:

It all began in 1939, when husband-and-wife researchers Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck assembled a team of investigators to go door to door through a number of poor Boston neighborhoods and collect data on boys who had grown up there. Their goal was to understand what causes some boys and not others to get involved with crime, a question which, as it happened, would be dramatically brought to life in the story of Whitey Bulger and his overachieving brother in the state Senate, William.

The Gluecks picked a sample of 1,000 boys, half of whom had stayed out of trouble while the other half had racked up records and gotten themselves locked up at one of two local reform schools, Lyman and Shirley. The boys were interviewed repeatedly – once when they were around 14, then again when they were 25 and 32 – as were their teachers, parents, and neighbors. Their world – Whitey’s world – was carefully documented, and their lives were charted as they grew from adolescents into adults…

The original researchers didn’t publish all of their data and several decades later, two criminologists dug into the data and interviewed some of the original participants. Here is what they found:

Their study earned Laub and Sampson accolades in their field for their insights into the nature of crime. But it also points to a few truths specifically about Boston, and the way the city shaped the Glueck boys while they grew into the Glueck men. It mattered a lot where these boys came from, Laub and Sampson concluded: The city had influenced them like no other city could have. Specifically, according to Sampson, it had made them cynical about authority.

All the poor neighborhoods in Boston were isolated to some degree in the 1940s: As Sampson and Laub discovered, kids who grew up in ethnic enclaves like Southie or the North End during that time did not identify with the city as a whole. Their lives were just too separate from everyone else’s, their daily routines too local. Plus, they knew the people who ran the show on Beacon Hill thought of their neighborhoods as slums, and they resented it.

This is an interesting piece as such large studies can offer a wealth of data and insights. This makes me wonder if other large datasets would benefit from teams of researchers later combing through the data to explore different areas and follow-up.

This is the sort of information that would help provide a broader context to Bulger’s case but I suspect the media will mainly stick to his mob background.

Data to assess Ray Lewis’ claim that crime would increase if the NFL doesn’t play

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A while back, I called for data to assess Ray Lewis’ claim that crime would rise if the NFL doesn’t have games. A group of journalists decided to use data to examine Lewis’ argument and even made at least one of the comparisons I suggested might be helpful:

The AJC accepted Lewis’ invitation to do that research, contacted the Northeastern’s Sport in Society center and was told that “there is very little evidence supporting Lewis’ claim that crime will increase the longer the work stoppage lasts.”…

The Sun looked at crime in Baltimore the four weeks before the season started and the first four weeks of the season. There was the same number of crimes. The Sun also examined the crime rate there at the end of the Ravens’ season and what happened afterward. What did it find? There was less crime after the season ended in early January.

The Sun stressed several times that its findings were unscientific…

The AJC then went to look at increases in crime during bye weeks, assuming that the no football/higher crime equation would fit a much shorter time frame. No real evidence was presented that would lead in one direction or another.

One criminologist we interviewed had a different take. Northeastern University professor James A. Fox heard Lewis’ comments and did a study. He looked at key FBI data from the last three years available, 2006 through 2008, focusing on the week before the Super Bowl because there were no games that week and there was intense interest in football around that time of the year. Fox, who was referred to us by the FBI, found no increase in crime the week there was no football.

This isn’t comprehensive data – but it’s a start. Of course, such studies need to control for a lot of possible factors that could affect crime levels and fairly large samples across multiple cities are needed.

I still don’t quite understand why the media’s response to Lewis’ claim with data has been either slow or not disseminated widely, particularly Lewi’s argument was widely aired and discussed.

James Q. Wilson on the difficulties of studying culture

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In a long opinion piece looking at possible explanations for the reduction in crime in America, James Q. Wilson concludes by suggesting that cultural explanations are difficult to test and develop:

At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression’s fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society’s cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.

Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not of data-driven social scientists. But we can take some comfort, perhaps, in reflecting that identifying the likely causes of the crime decline is even more important than precisely measuring it.

I find it a little strange that a social scientist wants to leave culture to the humanities (“novelists and biographers”). This sounds like a traditional social science perspective: culture is a slippery concept that is difficult to quantify and make generalizations about. I can imagine this viewpoint from quantitatively minded social scientists who would ask, “where it the data?”

But there is a lot of good research regarding culture that utilizes data. Some of this data is fuzzier qualitative data that involves ethnographies and long interviews and observations. But other data regarding culture comes from more traditional data sources such as large surveys. And if you put together a lot of these data-driven studies, qualitative and quantitative, I think you could put together some hypotheses and ideas regarding American culture and crime. Perhaps all of this data can’t fit into a regression or this isn’t the way that crime is traditionally studied but that doesn’t mean we have to simply abandon cultural explanations and studies.

Drop in crime due to decreased lead exposure?

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The crime rate in the United States is down again and people are looking for reasons why. Here is an interesting possible answer from James Q. Wilson: crime is down because people are exposed to less lead. This is how the reduction in lead would help:

In recent years, neuroscientists have made important progress in identifying the precise mechanisms by which lead exposure reduces impulse control…

While we can’t always control what we feel – many of our urges are ancient drives, embedded deep in the brain – we can control the amount of attention we pay to our feelings. When faced with a tempting treat, we can look away…

The tragedy of lead exposure is that it undermines one of the most essential mental skills we can give our kids, which is the ability to control what they’re thinking about. While the unconscious will always be full of impulses we can’t prevent, and the world will always be full of dangerous temptations, we don’t have to give in. We can choose to direct the spotlight of attention elsewhere, so that instead of thinking about the marshmallow we’re thinking about Sesame Street, or instead of thinking about our anger we’re counting to ten. And so there is no fight. We walk away.

This is an interesting argument. I suspect there is a bigger story that could be told about lead reduction over the years: Wilson hints at the background as the EPA announced a phased-in reduction in the lead in gasoline in late 1973 and lead was banned from paint in 1977. These facts are taken for granted now but I imagine these were public health announcements that created some discussion at the time, particularly from industry lobbying groups.

Is there a way to test the lead hypothesis by looking at a comparison group?

If this turned out to be a primary factor in the reduction of crime, how would public officials, police officers, and the public work with this information?

Columnist cites FBI data regarding Ray Lewis’ football lockout crime claim

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Earlier this week, I posted about Ray Lewis’ comment that if there is a football lockout, crime rates will increase. While Lewis has taken a media beating, I suggested that I hadn’t seen anyone cite data to refute (or support) Lewis’ claim. A columnist in Salt Lake City does look at some data that perhaps sheds light on the relationship between football and crime:

Well, it turns out that crime rates among the general population do actually decrease during the football season. The FBI believes the trend is not connected to football, but to the change in weather and the end of summer break for students. Apparently, criminals like to do their work in warm weather and when they’re not on vacation.

Research indicates that the only crime connection to football might be the increase in domestic violence on NFL Sundays when home teams lose emotional games. Maybe Lewis is wrong; maybe the lockout will reduce crime in the home.

I wish there were specific citations in this column but here is the gist of this cited data: overall, crime goes down in fall (compared to summer) and domestic violence goes up after certain game outcomes. The problem here is that it is difficult to separate the effects of fall (weather, kids back to school, etc.) from the effect of football games themselves. And if there are no close football games, then domestic violence cases might go down. Per my earlier post, I still think we could get more specific data, particularly comparing crime rates on Sundays with or without games and crime rates on other nights with football games (Monday, Thursday, Saturday) versus those same nights without games.

This columnist also throws out another idea that I had thought about:

Then it occurred to me: Maybe Lewis didn’t mean the fans would go on a crime wave without football; maybe he meant THE PLAYERS.

That’s not a big stretch. Look how Antonio Bryant has fared in recent months without football. Look what Michael Vick, Plaxico Burress and Ben Roethlisberger, among many others, did when they were away from football. Idle hands and all that. Maybe what Lewis meant was that we better end this lockout before the players starting (ran)sacking villages and throwing innocent bystanders for losses and intercepting Brinks trucks and so forth.

This image would fit with research suggesting NFL players are arrested at fairly high rates.