Tag Archives: crime

Reminder after murder in Naperville: the suburb has the lowest crime rates of a city its size in Illinois

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In the aftermath of a murder Friday night in Naperville, I wanted to issue a reminder about crime in Naperville before anyone jumps to any conclusions about violence in the suburb. Naperville is a safe place:

Naperville is by far the safest city of its size in Illinois.

The 2010 crime statistics released by the FBI Monday show that the level of crime in Naperville is far lower than is typical for Illinois’ largest cities.

For every 10,000 residents in the city, there were about 151 property crimes in Naperville, compared to 203 in Elgin and 216 in Aurora…

Rockford and Springfield reported by far the highest crime rates among the state’s largest towns. For every 10,000 Naperville residents, 9 violent crimes were reported. Elgin (33), Aurora (36) and Joliet (36) had the next best rates.

Violent crime is rare in Naperville although not unheard of. The city likes to trumpet the low crime rate. Notice how it is part of the one paragraph lead-in to the “Welcome to Naperville” video on the city’s website:

Located 28 miles west of Chicago, Naperville, Ill., is home to approximately 145,000 people. This vibrant, thriving city consistently ranks as a top community in the nation in which to live, raise children and retire. The city is home to acclaimed public and parochial schools, the best public library system in the country, an array of healthcare options and an exceptionally low crime rate. Naperville has ready access to a variety of public transportation, housing and employment options. The city’s diversified employer base features high technology firms, retailers and factories, as well as small and home-based businesses. Residents also enjoy world-class parks, diverse worship options, the opportunity to serve on several city boards and commissions, a thriving downtown shopping and dining area, a renowned living history museum known as Naper Settlement and an active civic community.

Not just a “low crime rate” but an “exceptionally low crime rate.” This pitch is made by many people beyond City Hall.

Still, a well-regarded suburb like Naperville must always be wary of perceptions. Murders in your downtown entertainment district are not the kind of news that you want. Even if crime rates are low, perceptions can change quickly and crime is one of those factors that pushes suburbanites into other communities. See this commentary from one of the Naperville high schools:

As the population rises within Naperville so do the crime rates. Naperville is known as one of the safest cities to live and raise a family in. The town claims to have a protected and secure profile, though lately there have been signs of increasing crime rates.

Naperville police have found that burglaries rose nearly thirty percent since last year while robberies climbed nearly thirty-five percent. Although property crime rates are on the rise, violent crime has decreased from the past few years.  A few months ago, senior Stephy Drago had a few friends over at night. There was about eight cars lined up in front of the house and two of the cars were broken into. A paycheck and an IPod were stolen from one car and money from the other…

Even though property crime continues to expand, recently the Naperville Police Department has let go of six police officers in late November due to a budget deficit. Hundreds of residents protested through Downtown Naperville to the outside of City Hall objecting the layoffs of these officers…

Still, proper precautions should be taken such as hiding important valuables if left in a car or locking a garage door at night.

Even though the article says Naperville has low crime rates, the perception is that crime is always just lurking around the corner. Without the “right” number of police, the safety of the town could quickly disappear. Since Naperville is such a large suburb, I wonder if it is easier for people to make the association between crime rates and the big city, making Naperville into a different kind of place. Perhaps this all says more about how Americans think about crime in general: even in the nicest places, the perceived risk of crime is up.

We shall see what happens: I assume the city will go out of its way to assure residents that this downtown incident is an isolated one and not in the character of the community. On the other hand, residents and others might start to wonder if this sort of news will become “normal.” Managing these perceptions and expectations will be important as Naperville moves forward.

Thief caught stealing used sociology textbook at IPFW

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Here is a story you don’t see everyday: a thief was caught stealing a used sociology textbook from the Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne bookstore.

A Fort Wayne man is facing a charge of felony theft for allegedly stealing a used sociology textbook.

Surveillance video at Follett’s bookstore at IPFW showed Neil W. White leaving the store without paying for the book, “Sociology in Our Times: The Essentials,” which cost $139.50, according to court papers.

White, 29, told an IPFW police detective that he stole the book, and he also admitted taking textbooks from the store 10 to 12 other times, court papers stated.

A few thoughts:

1. This guy needed a sociology textbook so bad that he stole it?

2. The bookstore was asking nearly $140 for a used copy of a intro to sociology textbook? It looks like you can buy this new at Amazon for $110 and used for around $70.

3. Have sociologists really ever gotten behind a cheaper textbooks movement or even gone so far to use the “steal this book” marketing campaign? If not, you would think sociologists might support this given their ideological commitments.

“Print journalism has never strayed from a narrative that insists sociology is the answer”

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I was not aware that “print journalism has never strayed from a narrative that insists sociology is the answer.” This opinion piece also suggests that finding explanations for the drop in crime in Dallas and elsewhere in the United States is difficult.

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.