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Disaggregating gang activity: an exploratory study of the socio-demographic context of gang activity

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Abstract

This paper examines the social ecology of gang activity in Fort Worth, Texas, a community with decades-long and recent growth in Latino immigrant populations. Focusing on the contextual correlates of police-defined gang incidents, the paper explores the relationship between traditional social ecological measures of concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, Latino immigration and racial composition and police-defined gang crime activity in Fort Worth communities. To better understand the social ecological dynamics that correlate with gang activity, the analysis uniquely disaggregates gang activity using 1) the police department’s gang-related classification system and, 2) four categories of gang crime behaviors within police classifications. Overall, the findings reveal that traditional social ecological indicators are significantly related to gang activity; however, the relationship collapses with disaggregation by gang-involved and gang-related crime behaviors and the four disaggregated crime classifications. Implications for research, theory, and policy are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The second approach included the percent of residents under the federally defined poverty threshold, the percent of residents on public assistance, the percent of residents in the work force who are unemployed, and the percent of families that are headed by females with own children under the age of 18. In these models, percent Black is used as a separate measure in the model in an effort to disentangle the influence of socioeconomic status from the influence of racial composition. Cronbach’s alpha of this index was 0.828. These measures were included in two separate sets of diagnostic models (one that included the concentrated disadvantage measure that included percent Black, and the other that did not include this but included a separate measure of percent Black in each census tract). These models also included the other important measures outlined below. Each model was run in SPSS ® while requesting collinearity diagnostics. An examination of VIFs indicated that the model where percent Black is incorporated as an isolated measure resulted in VIFs well above acceptable levels. As such, all models use the concentrated disadvantage measure that includes percent Black. This point will be further discussed later in the paper.

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  1. School of Criminal Justice, Texas State University, Hines Academic Center 108, 600 University Drive, San Marcos, TX, 78666, USA

    Meghan E. Hollis

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  1. Meghan E. Hollis
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Hollis, M.E. Disaggregating gang activity: an exploratory study of the socio-demographic context of gang activity. Crime Law Soc Change 71, 441–458 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-018-9798-3

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