East Side Story: Disaggregating Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles

Matthew Valasik,Shannon E Reid

doi:10.3390/socsci10020048

Matthew Valasik, Shannon E Reid

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10020048

Copy DOI

Abstract

This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted history of intergenerational Latinx gangs with local neighborhood residents viewing them as a fundamental social problem. Hollenbeck has over 30 active street gangs, each claiming a geographically defined territory, many of which have remained stable during the study period. Over twenty years (1990–2012) of homicide data collected from Hollenbeck’s Homicide Division are utilized to create an empirically rigorous typology of homicide incidents and to test whether or not gang homicides are sufficiently distinct in nature to be a unique category in the latent class analysis.

Highlights

Story: Disaggregating GangPrior to the Covid-19 Pandemic, which disrupted crime trends (Campedelli et al 2020; Mohler et al 2020; Rosenfeld and Lopez 2020), homicide rates across many jurisdictions were at some of the lowest levels on record, yet this has not lessened policymakers and police agencies’ desire to further reduce the number of homicides within a given jurisdiction
In building on the literature on homicide disaggregation, this study addresses an important gap in the literature: How does the variation in the circumstances, motive, setting, participant characteristics, and rivalry relationship in gang-related homicides distinguish one type of event from another? The objective was to systematically ascertain which participant and incident characteristics differentiate discrete subtypes or classes of gang-related homicide using Latent class analysis (LCA)
The LCA revealed that a five class solution was both appropriate and meaningful in terms of the theoretical focus in understanding gang-related violence

Summary

Introduction

Prior to the Covid-19 Pandemic, which disrupted crime trends (Campedelli et al 2020; Mohler et al 2020; Rosenfeld and Lopez 2020), homicide rates across many jurisdictions were at some of the lowest levels on record, yet this has not lessened policymakers and police agencies’ desire to further reduce the number of homicides within a given jurisdiction Despite these overall reductions in violence, gang prevalence continues to be a widespread phenomenon throughout the United States, as witnessed by an increase of over 20 percent in the number of jurisdictions reporting gang problems to the National. Land and colleagues (Land et al 1990) indicate that homicide research needs to better investigate whether the associations between a study’s community covariates (i.e., population structure, deprivation, and percent divorced) and aggregated homicides are generalizable to disaggregated types of homicide. Much of the research on gang-related violence disaggregates the incidents into gang and non-gang homicides

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion