Disparities in Violence in Neighborhoods in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Written by Miriam Bermejo
Edited by Numa Islam
September 27th, 2023
Edited by Numa Islam
September 27th, 2023
Research
The violence present in less privileged communities already existed but the COVID-19 pandemic has further sharpened the disparity by furthering economic and housing instability and reducing access to support services and other resources. Researchers with the Violence Prevention Research Program in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Davis seek to show in which social groups the burden of violence was highest and in which cities to see who is affected and the environmental conditions that may contribute to risk.
They focused on crimes from March through July in 2018, 2019, and 2020 in 13 major cities: Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; Cincinnati, Ohio; Dallas, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Detroit, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Phoenix, Arizona; San Francisco, California; and Seattle, Washington. They examined interpersonal firearm violence crime reports from the Gun Violence Archive. Homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault crime reports were collected from publicly available data. Complete crime reports that included zip codes that occurred slightly out of city bounds were still included as long as the land was not more than half out of the city bounds. The Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE) was used to measure spatial concentration and the direction individuals in the zipcodes distributed across income, race, and race income.
During the pandemic, firearm violence, assault, and homicide increased by 29.3%. 4.0% and 27.7% respectively; robbery decreased by 23.3% and rape decreased by 31.4%. They found that aggravated assault was the most common crime while homicide was the least common crime. ICE showed that zip codes with more low-income households and people of color experienced higher rates of violence between March through July 2020 than zip codes with more high-income households and White people.
Since the data used came from police reports and sources that use news reports and other public sources, there are limitations. It's possible that not all incidents were recorded and the criteria used to fill out police reports could have changed over time. Furthermore, there are strains between law enforcement and communities of color that could have affected reporting crimes.
Further research is needed to identify factors that are driving these results to provide insight into how to structure interventions to mitigate these disparities.
References
Schleimer, J. P., Buggs, S. A., McCort, C. D., Pear, V. A., Biasi, A. D., Tomsich, E., Shev, A. B.,
Laqueur, H. S., & Wintemute, G. J. (2022). Neighborhood racial and economic
segregation and disparities in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. American
Journal of Public Health, 112(1), 144–153. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2021.306540
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