By: Louise E. Porter and Adam Graycar

Some places have no crime and some have a lot, and thus we study hotspots. Corruption is structured differently to crime, but hotspots still are notable. The difference is that hotspots are not places but clusters of activity. This paper analyses corruption cases from New York City to explore a way of identifying such clusters. Seventy-two cases were coded according to features that represent the elements of the crime triangle: offender and motivation, target and opportunity, and place and ability. Multidimensional scaling revealed three groups of cases, exhibiting different patterns of corrupt activity. Group one involved politicians involved in high value financial corruption. Group two primarily involved supervisors who created opportunities involving procurement and contracts. Group three involved inspectors, particularly in the infrastructure sector, who were involved with low value bribes to violate regulations. Each is discussed in relation to situational crime prevention principles to develop possible strategies for prevention.

Security Journal, Vol. 29 (3) 423-441.

By Timothy F. Leslie, Cara L. Frankenfeld & Angela J. Hattery 

Background: Police shootings are unevenly spatially distributed, with substantive spikes throughout the USA. While minorities are disproportionately the victims of the police force, social or structural factors associated with this distribution are not well understood. The objective of this work was to evaluate police shootings in relation to victim race or ethnicity and residential segregation and racial diversity.

Methods: Validated crowdsourced data from the Washington Post’s Fatal Force (2015–2020) were linked with census tract-level data from the American Community Survey. Residential minority dissimilarity, interaction, and a racial and ethnic diversity metric were calculated in order to assess the potentially variant importance of evenness in distribution, exposure likelihood, and general representation. Logistic and multinomial regression was used to model associations between segregation and diversity, adjusted for other ecological characteristics. Analyses were stratified by victim race or ethnicity (Black, Asian, or Hispanic).

Results: Across all races combined, the odds of a police shooting in a particular census tract were associated with non-Hispanic Black dissimilarity (OR = 0.98, 95% CI 0.97, 0.99) and racial and ethnic diversity (1.046, 95% CI 1.044, 1.060). Areas with higher racial diversity had a higher likelihood of having a police shooting event with Black victims (OR = 1.092, 95% CI 1.064, 1.120) or Asian victims (OR = 1.188, 1.051, 1.343) than less diverse areas. Higher non-Hispanic Black interaction was associated with a lower likelihood of having a police shooting event with Black victims (OR = 0.914, 95% CI 0.833, 0.946) than lower interaction areas. Higher Hispanic dissimilarity was associated with a lower likelihood of having a police shooting event with a Hispanic victim (OR = 0.398, 95% CI 0.324, 0.489) than in lower dissimilarity areas.

Conclusions: The variant effects of residential segregation are only seen when victims are analyzed separately by race. There appears to be a protective effect for Hispanic populations in Hispanic communities, while the reverse is true of Black individuals. We urge law enforcement responsible for locations with segregated communities to monitor individual interactions that police have with residents as well as the patterns of frequency and context of those interactions.

Injury Epidemiology volume 9, Article number: 8 (2022)