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The Effect of Gang Perpetrated Crime on the Likelihood of Non-Lethal Victim Injury

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Abstract

Studies consistently find that gang members are involved in a disproportionately high rate of violence. The association between gangs and violence is largely based on the legal definition of violence, however. The current study moves beyond the legal definition of gang violence by examining the relationship between non-lethal gang involved incidents and the likelihood of victim injury, using pooled data (1992–2005) from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Overall, results reveal that gang members are not more likely than are non-gang members to injure their victims. When analyses are restricted to incidents involving injury, or incidents involving weapons, gang members are no more likely to more severely injure their victims than non-gang members. Strengths and limitations of the study are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Victimization surveys available include, but are not limited to, the National Crime Victimization Survey (United States), the British Crime Surveys (England and Wales), the Scottish Crime Survey (Scotland), the International Crime Victimization Survey. In addition, several countries are currently exploring the possibility of implementing a crime survey (e.g., Japan and Mexico).

  2. Twenty-eight cases in which the respondent did not provide information on whether they were or were not injured were dropped from the analyses.

  3. Another option is to measure severity at the ordinal level. For example, injury to the victim could be measured from no injury to minor injury to serious injury. Given this scheme, a proportional odds logistic regression model is suggested (Long 1997; Hosmer and Lemeshow 2000). Proportional odds model compares a single outcome response to one or more reference categories (Hosmer and Lemeshow 2000) and resulting inferences from them lend themselves to a general discussion of direction of response and without a focus on specific outcome categories. While analytically feasible, this approach is not used because analyses (not shown) demonstrate that the assumption of parallel regression is violated.

  4. Analyses were also conducted using an independent variable coded as “0” non-lethal gang violence, “1” non-lethal non-gang violence and “2” unknown gang membership of offender(s). Models using this measurement are statistically and substantively the same as analyses shown. In other words, these findings demonstrate that non-lethal gang violence does not differ significantly from non-lethal, non-gang violence, nor does it differ from non-lethal violence where the gang membership of the offender is not clear.

  5. To further examine this issue, the authors disaggregated the data by offense type (e.g., robbery, assault,…) to determine if the effect of gang membership on victim injury was offense specific. Results revealed that gang membership was not significantly associated with victim injury in any of the disaggregated models.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank T.J. Taylor, Brian Payne, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We are solely responsible for any errors or omissions that remain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, 560 Baker Hall, East Lansing, MI, 48824–1118, USA

    Chris Melde

  2. University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Callie Marie Rennison

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  1. Chris Melde
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  2. Callie Marie Rennison
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Correspondence to Chris Melde.

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Melde, C., Rennison, C.M. The Effect of Gang Perpetrated Crime on the Likelihood of Non-Lethal Victim Injury. Am J Crim Just 33, 234–251 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-008-9044-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-008-9044-0

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