Translational Criminology And The Science of Community - 5 of 11 - , robert sampson cont.

Sampson: There is some really interesting work going on now in Boston, and this is actually hot off the press. Anthony Braga, David Hureau, who's a student at Harvard, and others, have been working hard in collaboration with the police department to get data on shootings and crime and looking at hotspots, but the Boston Neighborhood Survey has replicated a key component of the PHDCN survey, carried out in the Harvard School of Public Health and a few other people involved in that. And this is a map that shows the distribution of collective efficacy measured just the way I have been talking about it in Boston, and you'll note that there is tremendous variability in the city with regard to the distribution. The blue and yellow, basically, areas are the low collective efficacy on this map, in case you can't read the legend, and the sort of orangeish-red areas here are high. So what you find, like you find in Stockholm, like you find in Chicago, and now we're finding in Brisbane, Australia, and Los Angeles and other cities around the world, is tremendous ecological variability. And although this analysis is still going on, I mean, I'm not giving you a final story here, when you put shootings in Boston over that, that's what you see, okay? Each triangle is a shooting in Boston, and it maps very closely. Now, we could have an argument about causality and what's going on. I presented data to show that I think that there is a relationship; I actually think it's reciprocal and that's what our data shows. I just didn't have time to get into it; that is, collective efficacy reduces crime, crime reduces collective efficacy. There's a reciprocal ongoing relationship. In this particular analysis, David has gone on to show that this relationship holds after controlling for concentrated poverty, the odds ratio is something like over three for poverty and about one and a half for collective efficacy, so the strong relationship for both factors. But I just wanted to give you a feel for the idea that it's not just about Chicago.