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Crime Rates, Crime Spikes and Cardiovascular Health in an Urban Population

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Crime, HIV and Health: Intersections of Criminal Justice and Public Health Concerns

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Abstract

We draw on theories of neighborhood social organization and environmental stress in an effort to explain variation in cardiovascular risk in a large urban population. We focus on the role of rapid increases in the crime rate (“crime spikes”) in influencing an indicator of inflammatory processes related to cardiovascular health – C-reactive protein (CRP). Employing data from the Dallas Heart Study (2000–2002), a large-scale probability study of adults aged 18–65 years old, we examine the association between measures of census tract level burglary rates and CRP. Neighborhood fixed effects models reveal that both changes in the overall prior-year burglary rate and short-term change in the burglary rate between the first and last 6 months of the prior year are positively associated with CRP. Above a threshold of four burglaries per 1,000 population, a one burglary increase in the short-term burglary rate change measure is associated with a 9% increase in CRP, net of individual controls, time-invariant neighborhood characteristics, and calendar month. These findings offer additional evidence supporting the hypothesis that contextual stressors have implications for cardiovascular health and suggest that short-term changes in environmental stressors may independently shape health risk outcomes.

We thank Helen Hobbs and James De Lemos of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas for generously providing access to the Dallas Heart Study data. We also gratefully acknowledge seed grant support from the Ohio State University Initiative on Population Research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Comparison of means indicates that minimal differences exist between the samples of respondents who completed visit 2 before and after 30 days had elapsed from visit 1.

  2. 2.

    We used Stata’s ICE command (Imputation with Chained Equations).

  3. 3.

    For women, an obvious crime to consider would be sexual assault. However, evidence suggests that administrative data on sexual assault are difficult to collect with accuracy.

  4. 4.

    We capped the burglary rate change score variable at less than 22 burglaries per 1,000 population, dropping seven cases from the analysis that had rates exceeding 22. Among these cases were four instances in which the burglary rate was 0 in the first 6 months with an implausibly high burglary rate in the last 6 months, calling into question the accuracy of the data. Analyses including these cases revealed comparable results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 238 Townshend Hall, 1885 Neil Ave Mall, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Christopher R. Browning Ph.D.

  2. Departments of Sociology, Health Studies, and Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Kathleen A. Cagney Ph.D.

  3. Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    James Iveniuk

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  1. Christopher R. Browning Ph.D.
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  2. Kathleen A. Cagney Ph.D.
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  3. James Iveniuk
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Correspondence to Christopher R. Browning Ph.D. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Justice &, Criminalistics, California State University, Los Angeles, State University Drive 5151, Los Angeles, 90032, California, USA

    Bill Sanders

  2. , Howard University, Office of Regulatory Research Compliance, 7th Street 1840, Washington, 20001, District of Columbia, USA

    Yonette F. Thomas

  3. National Institute on Drug Abuse, Div. Epidemiology, Services &, National Institutes of Health, Executive Blvd. 6001, Bethesda, 20892-9589, Maryland, USA

    Bethany Griffin Deeds

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Browning, C.R., Cagney, K.A., Iveniuk, J. (2013). Crime Rates, Crime Spikes and Cardiovascular Health in an Urban Population. In: Sanders, B., Thomas, Y., Griffin Deeds, B. (eds) Crime, HIV and Health: Intersections of Criminal Justice and Public Health Concerns. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8921-2_10

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