Robert Stokes

A Macro-Level Model of School Disorder:

Drawing on school climate theory and social disorganization theory, this article examines the influence of major institutional and community factors on disorder in Philadelphia public schools. Using U.S. census data, school district data, and police data, the authors examined the following predictors of disorder in 43 middle schools: community poverty and residential stability, community crime, school size, and school stability. Community was conceptualized in two ways: local (the census tract around the school) and imported (aggregated measures from the census tracts in which students actually reside). Previous studies have failed to make this distinction when assessing community-level influences on school disorder. The authors used path analysis to examine direct and indirect relationships between community characteristics (poverty, residential stability, crime rates), school size, school stability (a factor score based on student attendance and turnover), and school disorder (a factor score based on school incident data and dismissal rates). The local community model fit the data better than the imported model: The communities immediately surrounding schools have a stronger influence on school disorder than the communities from which students are drawn. Community poverty exerted strong indirect effects on school disorder in both models. The effects of community variables on school disorder were strongly mediated by school stability, illustrating that analyses of institutional processes have much to add to the explanation of school disorder.

Race, Social Capital, and Trust in the Police

Using a national survey of U.S. residents this study examines racial, socioeconomic, and community explanations for the trust of local police. We hypothesize that the construct of social capital offers a nexus for explaining racial differences in attitudes toward the police. We measure social capital as a construct by aggregating together measures that assess the degree of trust and civic engagement in communities. The results indicate that depleted levels of perceived community social capital contribute to higher levels of distrust of local police. Social capital, however, partially mediates the relative distrust of Blacks toward the police. These findings suggest only partial support for a social capital explanation of Blacks’ distrust in the police. The implications of these findings for police reform efforts to mend minority relations in urban cities are discussed.

Race, Neighbourhood Context and Perceptions of Injustice by the Police in Cincinnati

Research has long identified racial differences in perceptions of criminal injustice. Given that race is confounded with neighbourhood context, it remains unclear the extent to which individual or neighbourhood attributes explain racial differences in these perceptions. This paper advances research on racial differences in perceptions of unjust police practices in the US by relying on a survey of 3000 residents in 53 Cincinnati neighbourhoods. A propensity score weighting approach is used to identify a model by which Whites and Blacks living in similar neighbourhood environments can be compared with each other. The results demonstrate that race remains a significant predictor of perceptions of unjust police practices, even after taking into account the ecological structuring of neighbourhoods and their perceived environmental context. These findings suggest that racial consciousness with regard to perceived injustices by the police is not purely a condition of personal or structural disadvantage. The implications of these findings for police reform efforts to mend minority relations in urban cities are discussed.

Business Improvement Districts and Inner City Revitalization: The Case Of Philadelphia's Frankford Special Services District

Abstract The discourse of urban redevelopment and revitalization has changed remarkably over the past decade. With a decade of national economic growth leading to success in the professional services, tourism and convention markets, new life has been breathed into many city centers. This has led to a new theoretical focus on whether these gains could also be realized in city neighborhoods. A history of declining public resources brought on by the brutal confluence of de-industrialization and federal disinvestment left many neighborhood commercial areas at a loss in their competition with newly formed suburban retail developments. Moreover, surging crime rates and under-managed public space—which led to rising fear levels among urban space users—merely exacerbated this downward trend. This article examines the use of business improvement districts in inner city commercial areas. While much of the academic and popular press literature on BIDs has addressed their use in downtowns, their use is growing in smaller, neighborhood commercial and retail strips. While some neighborhood BIDs have a substantial history of service delivery and planning, most are recent entries onto the urban management landscape. After an analysis of neighborhood BIDs in major US cities, this article examines the commercial development policy of one city, Philadelphia. It then addresses the use of a neighborhood BID in one of Philadelphias more hardscrabble commercial areas, Frankford.

Fixing Broken Cities: The Implementation of Urban Development Strategies, by John Kromer. New York: Routledge, 2009. 330 pp.

The findings are interesting and have face validity, putting hard numbers on conclusions that many observers of suburbia have arrived at more informally or anecdotally. In this sense the book is a great overview of the suburban situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What the book lacks, however—and what ultimately will probably make it less memorable to many readers than Lucy and Phillips (2000) or Orfield (1997), despite the book’s empirical rigor—is a central organizing thesis or theoretical framework. Hanlon aims to describe intersuburb differences more than to explain them. Operating in inductive fashion, she draws from her findings a number of useful hypotheses about suburban decline, but these appear in the concluding few pages of the text and are presented as directions for future research. Earlier, in chapter 4, Hanlon ably reviews the literature on suburban change, describing three early sociological models: the suburban persistence model, the life-cycle model, and the stratification model. I do wish she had circled back to this discussion in the conclusion and made some summary judgments about which of these models are best supported by her data. Despite its lack of a central theoretical story line, Once the American Dream is a useful and readable volume. It serves as something of a primer and reference work on contemporary suburbia but also as an excellent summary of what is known about suburban differentiation and a well-documented example of how a variety of data methods can be applied to an interdisciplinary urban issue. The vignettes of specific communities give much additional texture to the findings. Finally, the brief discussion of recent and possible future policy approaches to suburban decline (in chapter 9) should be quite helpful to scholars, students, and policy makers alike. Overall, then, the book deserves a wide audience.