Eliminating Crime with Social Networks

As anyone who has seen Spike Lee’s ‘Do The Right Thing’ knows, heat brings people out of their houses, puts them in close quarters, and elevates stress. This effect is particularly bad in the “lowest income neighborhoods in the city… those are the neighborhoods where people are least likely to have air conditioning or adequate air conditioning”

Already, we have witnessed in Chicago a 38% increase in killings in 2012—a dramatic rise that has garnered local and national press attention and left people concerned about their safety in the city.
While investigating causes of the sharp increases in crime, we found an article citing research that points to a strong correlation between homicide and social network membership. Most of these crimes take place in a fairly confined geographic area, and over the last five years, 191 people have been killed in the 11^th Police District of Chicago, a region in the West Side. The odds of being a homicide victim in this area are about 3 out of 1000—three times greater risk than in other parts of the city, and support for the theory that rough neighborhoods have higher crime rates.
But according to Professor Andrew Papachristos’ research, rough neighborhoods alone aren’t the reason people are killed, it’s their rough social networks. In both Boston and Chicago, Dr. Papachristos found that the vast majority of homicides occur within tight-knit social networks.  In Chicago’s 11^th police district, more than 70% of the homicides in the past five years took place in a network of only 1,500 people. “For people in this network, the odds of being a homicide victim skyrockets to 30 out of every 1,000 people.” In Boston, the numbers were even higher; 80% of gunshot victims were in a similar social network of about 700 people.
In the context of crime prevention, this information could be invaluable. By focusing on combating small social networks as opposed to entire geographies, law enforcement might be able to drastically reduce violent crimes with limited manpower.  While not a cure-all solution, methodologies like social network analysis are already used extensively for counter-terrorism and anti-criminal activities. The next logical step might be to bring these techniques to the local level.
But doing so involves challenging data collection. Unlike mapping the networks of an organization, it isn’t easy to survey citizens about who they know in a network of people known for violent crimes, especially if the data will be used by law enforcement. Furthermore, collecting data from digital sources might be difficult as criminally active groups tend to be adept at avoiding leaving digital bread crumbs. So how could law enforcement officers possibly get this information?
According to Dr. Papachristos, nearly all the members in the Chicago and Boston social networks had criminal records and have been arrested with at least one other person in this social network. Perhaps the in-prison social network could be an opportunity to map the networks of people re-entering these potentially violent networks. In prison, it would be much easier to map this network, either by observation or digital means, and this could be used to assess the risk levels of certain key network members.
As with any data collection methodology, there are legal and moral implications to consider, but this type of research may lead to more data-driven approaches to lowering the crime rate.

Sources: https://syndiosocial.com/eliminating-crime-with-social-networks/