Abstract
Objectives
Although theories suggest that street network configurations (pathways) are important factors for understanding the spatial patterns of crime, relatively less attention has been paid to the association between the physical configuration of the street network and the level of crime in place. Consequently, we employed the concept of betweenness centrality in the context of the street network to empirically measure the potential foot traffic passing through a given street segment.
Methods
We introduce a methodological refinement by accounting for the characteristics of origin and destination of each potential trip (where travelers are from and tend to go) using residential population in origins and destinations and the number of various types of business employees in destinations. Moreover, we posit that the effect of potential foot traffic into a given street segment will be moderated by certain social environmental characteristics such as socioeconomic status of place. By using data on a sample of 300,000 street segments in the Southern California region across 130 cities, we estimate a set of negative binomial regression models including the betweenness measures.
Results
Our results show that betweenness centrality has a curvilinear relationship with violent and property crime: At lower levels, increases in betweenness results in increased crime, yet the pattern becomes crime-reducing at higher values of the betweenness measure. We also found that the pattern is moderated by the socioeconomic status of the street segment.
Conclusions
The current study highlights that there is an important relationship of the physical environment in terms of the street network configuration and crime in street segments.
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Notes
Online Appendix Figure A26 shows how the street network is represented to an abstract graph. As shown, we are interested in calculating betweenness of street segment \(X_{12}\) (green-shaded street segment) which captures how frequently \(X_{12}\) is traversed along the given street network from any origins to destinations through the shortest routes.
Another advantage of our weighting approach is that it implicitly adjusts for the varying lengths of street segments. That is, the unweighted approach simply counts the number of segments which send paths through a particular street segment, and therefore in neighborhoods with many short streets this can result in high betweenness centrality values simply because there are many (short) streets in the surrounding area. This can be seen in Fig. 2, below, where there is a cluster of red street segments in Venice, CA (located on the west wide of the map next to the coast), simply because there are many short street segments in this area. However, our weighted approach accounts for the number of persons traveling through such segments, and therefore shorter street segments that have fewer residents will be adjusted appropriately in our approach.
Whereas the percent single-parent households variable is available for blocks, for the other measures we use synthetic estimation for ecological inference as described by Boessen and Hipp (2015) to impute them from block groups to blocks (Cohen and Di Zhang 1988; Steinberg 1979). Variables used in the imputation model were: percent owners, racial composition, percent divorced households, percent households with children, percent vacant units, population density, and age structure (percent aged: 0–4, 5–14, 15–19, 20–24, 25–29, 30–44, 45–64, 65 and up, with age 15–19 as the reference category).
Refer to Kim (2018) for a detailed explanation on why racial/ethnic heterogeneity in street segments may function in a different way compared to other larger neighborhood units.
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Kim, YA., Hipp, J.R. Pathways: Examining Street Network Configurations, Structural Characteristics and Spatial Crime Patterns in Street Segments. J Quant Criminol 36, 725–752 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-019-09428-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-019-09428-7