Eric P. Baumer

Dimensions of Social Capital and Rates of Criminal Homicide

Robert Putnam comprehensively analyzes the multidimensional nature of social capital and makes a persuasive argument for its relevance to various community social problems, including violent crime. However, systematic empirical evaluations of the links between the multiple dimensions of social capital and violence are limited by the lack of adequate measures. Using data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey, the authors model the relationships between several dimensions of social capital and homicide rates for 40 U.S. geographic areas. Their findings show that many forms of social capital highlighted in the literature as having beneficial consequences for communities are not related to homicide rates. Two dimensions of social capital, social trust and social activism, do exhibit significant associations with homicide rates, net of other influences. However, in the latter case, the relationship is positive, and in both cases, simultaneous equation models suggest that these dimensions of social capital are consequences as well as causes of homicide. The results underscore the importance of examining the different dimensions of social capital and assessing their reciprocal relationships with homicide and other social outcomes.

The Influence of Crack Cocaine on Robbery, Burglary, and Homicide Rates: A Cross-City, Longitudinal Analysis

After tracking one another closely for decades, the U.S. robbery rate increased and the burglary rate declined in the late 1980s. The authors investigate the impact of crack on this divergence using a two-stage hierarchical linear model that decomposes between-and within-city variation in crime rates for 142 cities. Given its prominence in discussions of crack and criminal violence, homicide offending is also examined. Net of other influences, cities with higher levels of crack use experienced larger increases in robbery and decreases in burglary. Cities with greater levels of crack had higher homicide rates but did not show more rapid increases in these rates than other cities. The results suggest that the emergence and proliferation of crack shifted the balance of urban offending opportunities and rewards from burglary to robbery.

Explaining spatial variation in support for capital punishment: A multilevel analysis

This research examines the effects of social context on support for the death penalty using individual‐level data from the 1974–98 General Social Survey (GSS), which have been linked with aggregate‐level data on homicide rates and sociodemographic, political, and economic characteristics. Consistent with instrumental, social threat, and constructionist perspectives, this study finds that residents of areas with higher homicide rates, a larger proportion of blacks, and a more conservative political climate are significantly more likely to support the death penalty, net of compositional differences. These results warrant further attention to contextual and individual sources of public support for the death penalty.

Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing

Drawing on a systematic assessment of the accumulated empirical literature and interviews with 25 race and sentencing scholars, this paper argues that the standard approach adopted in research on race and sentencing in criminology is insufficient for addressing the key underlying questions that motivate this work, including whether, where, how, and why race may matter. In light of this assessment, the paper lays out some additional directions for empirical research in this area that would bolster the validity and reliability of our knowledge about how race shapes sentencing and enhance the policy relevance of this work.

Poverty, Crack, and Crime: A Cross-City Analysis

Many observers have attributed recent increases in violent crime rates to the arrival of crack cocaine on the urban scene. However, little hard evidence exists to support this contention. This study examines the relationship between arrestee cocaine use and homicide, robbery, and burglary rates for the 24 cities participating in the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) Program. To isolate the effects of rates of cocaine use among arrestees on crime rates, the analysis incorporates controls for additional city-level characteristics, including population composition and selected indicators of economic deprivation and social disorganization. Multivariate analyses reveal that arrestee cocaine use has a positive and significant effect on city robbery rates, net of other predictors. The effect of arrestee cocaine use on homicide is more modest, and no effect was found for burglary. Although these results must be interpreted cautiously, they do suggest that cocaine use elevates city violent crime rates beyond levels expected on the basis of known sociodemographic determinants. Serious consideration should be given to community-level indicators of drug use in formulating theories to explain inner-city violence and policies to reduce it.

Evaluating Contemporary Crime Drop(s) in America, New York City, and Many Other Places

This paper describes and evaluates some fundamental facts about the contemporary crime drop, summarizes the major explanations that have been offered for it, and assesses the validity of these explanations in light of observed trends. In contrast with much of the recent literature, we argue that the locus of the crime drop in the 1990s is not wholly consistent with the available data and that while New York City experienced substantial crime decreases, its uniqueness has been exaggerated. We suggest that it is important to partition the crime drop observed in New York City and elsewhere into global and more localized shifts, and we offer some observations about the factors that appear most germane to driving these different dimensions of recent crime drops. We conclude with some suggestions for future inquiry.

Still Separate and Unequal? A City-Level Analysis of the Black-White Gap in Homicide Arrests since 1960

More than four decades ago, the Kerner Report chronicled the violent disturbances of the 1960s and predicted that the United States was rapidly moving toward two racially separate and unequal societies. Resulting concerns about black and white inequality form a critical chapter in the history of sociological research. Few studies, however, explore trends in racial inequality in rates of violence. Has the gap between black and white violence rates significantly narrowed since 1960 and, if so, why? Drawing on recent work on assimilation and the literature on race inequality, we develop a set of hypotheses about black-white differences in violence rates and how these rates may have changed during the past four decades. We emphasize race differences in family structure, economic and educational inequality, residential integration, illicit drug involvement, and population composition. Using race-specific homicide arrest and census data on social, economic, and demographic conditions for 80 large U.S. cities from 1960 to 2000, we find substantial convergence in black-white homicide arrest rates over time, although this convergence stalled from the 1980s to the 1990s. Consistent with theoretical expectations, we find that, since the 1960s, the racial gap in homicide arrests declined more substantially in cities that had greater reductions in the ratio of black to white single-parent families, as well as in cities that experienced greater population growth and increases in the proportion of the population that is black. Also, as expected, the race gap in homicide arrests widened in cities that had an increasing ratio of black to white rates of drug arrests. Measures of racial integration, however, have no discernible impact on the black to white homicide arrest ratio.

Untangling research puzzles in Merton's multilevel anomie theory

The position advanced in this article is that, rather than presenting two analytically distinct theories as often claimed in the literature, the anomie perspective articulated by Robert Merton reflects one multilevel theory of how macro-level social and cultural conditions increase the likelihood of deviance among individuals. In this article, I translate Mertons multilevel theory into a precise causal model and describe how it accounts for variation in instrumental crime both within and across social collectivities. I then highlight the research implications of this multilevel model, including the types of data and methods needed to evaluate the model and the research puzzles that have been largely overlooked owing to the single-level approaches applied in previous explications of Mertons theory.

The contemporary foreclosure crisis and US crime rates

Foreclosure rates in America reached unprecedented levels during the last half of the 2000s, and many observers have speculated that elevated crime rates were one of the probable negative collateral consequences of this trend. We examine this issue with a comprehensive county-level analysis of the role of foreclosure in shaping contemporary crime patterns, highlighting the possibility of theoretically informed non-linear and conditional relationships. Multivariate regression models that account for the well-documented spatial autocorrelation of crime rates and the possible endogeneity of foreclosure reveal a positive association between rates of foreclosure and property crime that accelerates significantly once foreclosure rates attain historically high levels. Multiplicative models indicate that this pattern holds for burglary across diverse county conditions, but the observed non-linear effect of foreclosure on robbery rates is limited primarily to areas that also exhibit relatively high levels of resource deprivation and limited new housing construction.

The Breadth and Causes of Contemporary Cross-National Homicide Trends

Analysis of international homicide trends from the late 1980s through the late 2000s for a relatively large sample of nations showed that trends did not vary substantially by victim sex or age. There was, however, significant regional variation in overall trends during the 1990s, suggesting that there was not a global drop in lethal violence during this period, or at least not something that occurred everywhere simultaneously. During the 2000s there appears to be growing convergence across nations, with notable declines in most by the middle of the decade. Multivariate analyses indicate that the observed declines are most strongly linked to reductions in poverty and urbanization and an increase in “youth oversight,” the ratio of older to younger persons. No significant associations were observed between homicide trends and recent shifts in immigration, growth in imprisonment rates, and use of cellular phones and personal computers.