I first heard Andrew Papachristos, a sociologist at Yale University, present on networks of co-offenders in Chicago at the American Society of Criminology meetings in 2013. At the time I was blown away by his work, but it was a quick presentation and I wasn’t able to capture many of the details. Thankfully, I was browsing around the web recently preparing for a presentation I am making on gun violence as a health disparity and I came across a video of a presentation Papachristos made to the Illinois Academy of Criminology.
In this video, as in all of his work, Papachristos documents that gun violence is often tragic but it is rarely random. Gun violence is concentrated among certain people and in certain places. In Boston, 50% of gun violence takes place on just 3% of streets.
Moreover, like a blood borne disease, gun violence travels within social networks. In Boston, 85% of gunshot injuries took place in a network of just 6% of the population. In Chicago, 41% of homicides take place in a network of just 4% of the population.
Papachristos’s work is more than a scientific gloss on the old saw to not go stupid places or do stupid things with stupid people, though the work does reinforce that wisdom.
Watching this 30 minute video is probably the most beneficial 30 minutes I have spent this week. Enjoy!
I know Andy very well. He was going to present a paper at a gun violence conference we are doing in December but decided to go to Greece and visit with the relatives instead. Of course his research also pokes holes in the NRAâs favorite canard about the importance of using a gun for self-defense since the only people who need to carry a gun for self-defense are the people that Papachristos studies, not the White guy living in some small town who thinks heâs going to be the victim of a crime, even if he isnât.
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Interested to know more about details of your conference. Is it public?
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[…] Social Science and Medicine, is Yale University sociologist Andrew Papachristos. Having previously written favorably about Papachristos’s argument that violence is “tragic but not random,” I was excited to see it picked up on in the gun […]
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Los Angeles Times’ crime reporter Jill Leovy’s new book “Ghettoside” has important data on who murders whom in Los Angeles and why:
http://takimag.com/article/wasted_advantages_steve_sailer#axzz3SF25Ivtn
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[…] Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos’s recent work on injury and homicide involving guns in Chicago shows how most of the problem revolves around a […]
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[…] the United States with 18.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, 4 times the national average. But as Andrew Papachristos has shown in his research there are vastly different rates of homicide and gunshot injury according to where one lives in […]
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[…] the United States with 18.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, 4 times the national average. But as Andrew Papachristos has shown in his research there are vastly different rates of homicide and gunshot injury according to where one lives in […]
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Hey David,
You don’t really mean “victories” — right?
“In Boston, 85% of gunshot victories took place in a network of just 6% of the population.”
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LOL, NO! Thanks Elenor for the catch!
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[…] high rate of violence, including lethal violence. I have written about this before (regarding how violence gets passed through social networks in Chicago) and have highlighted both policing and public health approaches to addressing it that […]
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[…] (3) the National Science Foundation funds basic scientific research in sociology, for example Andrew Papachristos’s excellent work on networks of gun violence (and perhaps other work that I am unaware of), (4) the National […]
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[…] Christopher Wildeman), whose work I like so much and about which I have written a number of times (here and here and here and here). His use of social networks to analyze the concentration of firearms […]
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[…] Tragic But Not Random: Andrew Papachristos on Gun Violence […]
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[…] we know from social scientific studies of concentrated gun violence — mocked and dismissed by some in gun culture — that the number of bad actors in any […]
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