PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

This dissertation explores a most recently uncovered criminogenic place network hypothesis, asserting that crime place networks exist, that these infrastructures facilitate criminal activity nearby, and that these networks can be disrupted to reduce shootings and other crimes. Data collected from the City of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio, are used to examine this hypothesis. Findings support the assertion that criminogenic place networks exist, that they do facilitate crime nearby, and that they can be disrupted. Evaluations of Cincinnati's Place Based Investigations of Violent Offender Territories (PIVOT), revealed declines in shootings, violent crime, and weapon related calls to police. Statistically significant changes in shootings were detected in four of five projects. Shooting reductions ranged from twelve percent to ninety-two percent in PIVOT sites, after implementation of the PIVOT crime place network disruption strategy.

Committee: John Eck Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Cory Haberman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Tamara Herold Ph.D. (Committee Member); Pamela Wilcox Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2021, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Environmental criminology and empirical research suggest that certain facilities and characteristics of the street network facilitate crime opportunities. These facilities are often referred to as potentially criminogenic facilities because the routine activities associated with their specific functions are thought to create crime opportunities. However, some scholars have contended that it is not the type of facility, but the traffic generated by them, that is responsible for their associations with crime. A separate body of research has linked the betweenness of streets, or their usage potential, to elevated crime levels, suggesting that busier streets are associated with more crime opportunities. This dissertation seeks to determine whether the density of facilities, a proxy for busyness, or specific types of facilities are the more robust predictor of robberies in Cincinnati, OH. The current study also assesses how the betweenness of streets influences the relationship between facilities and robbery. In addition, the potential interrelationship between facility density, street block betweenness, and robberies is examined using a path model. Results suggest that the busyness of facilities appears to be a more robust predictor of robberies than their individual types, but a handful of individual facilities were linked to elevated robberies even after accounting for the business of streets. The path model indicates that 1) facility density and betweenness are both positively associated with robberies, 2) betweenness is linked to a higher density of facilities, and 3) a significant portion of the effect of betweenness on robberies is indirectly transmitted through facility density.

Committee: Cory Haberman Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lucia Summers (Committee Member); Christopher Sullivan Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ben Feldmeyer Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

OBJECTIVES. This study addresses a shortcoming in the facility measurement approach used in some studies of crime and place. That is, researchers tend to treat facilities as though they have a homogenous crime risk despite research indicating there is significant variation in crime across facilities. In this study, I propose and examine a series of eight empirically rooted alternative measures of risky facilities. I assess what, if any, impact each has on the outcomes of models of robbery and theft at street blocks in Cincinnati, Ohio, as compared to the more commonly used homogenous risk measure. METHODS. To compare facility risk measures, I use a series of nearly identical negative binomial regressions to model the effects of sixteen facility types on robbery and theft at street blocks. Models vary only in their operationalization of facility risk. I use model comparison statistics (AIC, BIC) to determine if any of the proposed facility risk variables offer an improved model fit over the homogenous facility crime risk approach. For those that result in an improved fit, I assess model coefficients and significance to determine if the conclusions differ meaningfully from those derived from the homogenous facility crime risk approach. RESULTS. Of the eight proposed measures, only the continuous measure created using calls for service within a 500ft buffer area offered an improved model fit, and only for robbery. The conclusions drawn from the proposed measure regression results largely mirrored those of the homogenous facility count regression results. A number of other models that did not have an improved fit were impacted by multicollinearity, possibly due to the presence of co-located facilities with shared addresses. CONCLUSION. A continuous crime risk variable created using calls for service data within an approximately one block buffer area of facilities may act as an acceptable alternative measure of facility robbery risk in future studies of crime (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cory Haberman Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Martin Andresen Ph.D. (Committee Member); John Eck Ph.D. (Committee Member); Pamela Wilcox Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Crime hot spots are the result of offenders repeatedly perceiving and exploiting criminal opportunity at the same location. Theory supports the notion that offenders interact with their proximal environment; in fact, some have suggested proximal offenders condition the criminogenic effects of some types of facilities. Empirical tests have failed to clearly integrate measures of offenders and criminal opportunity in explanations of crime concentrations. The current dissertation integrated measures of likely offenders, from information on formally incarcerated persons, and criminal opportunity to explain concentrations of robbery and theft from auto across street blocks in Cincinnati. In addition, it tests whether exposure to offenders conditioned the effects of criminogenic facilities. Overall, findings show exposure to likely offenders is important to account for in explanations of crime concentrations. Not only do the likely offender measures have significant main effects, but they interact with some criminogenic facilities to create higher crime counts, beyond the independent effects of likely offender and facility measures.

Committee: Cory Haberman Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Groff Ph.D. (Committee Member); Edward Latessa Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christopher Sullivan Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Architectural journalist Jane Jacobs is arguably one of the most influential figures in urban social sciences and city planning. Yet, she has received minimal attention in the criminological literature. I argue this stemmed from her ideas being linked to those of Oscar Newman. However, these initial interpretations of her ideas—namely that street safety is achieved through surveillance by residents—do not appear to take her contextual examples into account. This mistake is important because it obscures a vital source of social control in urban environments. In this dissertation I examine Jacobs' work and argue that she regarded shopkeepers (i.e., place managers) as the primary source of informal social control. While past interpretations assume Jacobs had a resident-focused explanation of crime, I propose that she had an owner/manager-focus in her writing. From this I unite her work with recent theories of place management into a Neo-Jacobian perspective of place and neighborhood crime. The theory highlights how deliberate decisions and actions taken by property owners and government agencies give rise to neighborhood crime. I then test the theory with three studies using a mixed methods approach. The first study examines the mechanisms of property ownership and neighborhood crime through qualitative interviews in Walnut Hills, a neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio that is currently under redevelopment. Next, I conduct a time series analysis to examine how place-based redevelopment influences neighborhood crime in the same neighborhood. The last study tests the notion that there are at least two distinct crime generating processes operating within neighborhoods and that each possess different causal mechanisms. The results suggest that people external to neighborhoods can wield immense control within neighborhoods through property ownership. Moreover, the political decisions that impact the economic vitality of businesses can have a strong influence on crime. How (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Eck Ph.D. (Committee Chair); J.C. Barnes Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kate Bowers Ph.D. (Committee Member); Pamela Wilcox Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2018, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Opportunity theories of crime emphasize the importance of crime specificity, the tendency for crime to spatially cluster, and the influence that certain types of places have on the micro-level spatial distribution of crime events. Research using this theoretical framework overwhelmingly supports these assertions. However, much of this research falls short due in part to the choice of dependent variable. For instance, some research ignores the importance of crime specificity by using crime indices, which fail to account for the intricacies of criminal opportunity among crime types. Research focusing on individual crime types, such as robbery, also fail to account for within-crime type heterogeneity. Some newer research accounts for this by using disaggregated crime types, such as street, commercial, or residential robberies. That being said, how researchers define their dependent variable may influence their results and conclusions about the link between crime and place. The current study examines how sensitive spatial patterns of robberies are to different operationalizations of robbery. This study used Cincinnati Police Department robbery data from 2014 through 2016 (N = 4,066) which were then coded by Haberman et al. (forthcoming) to account for differences in victim-offender interaction and spatial environment. Using three different operationalizations of robbery, the following research questions were answered: (1) How, if at all, do different types of robbery spatially cluster? (2) Is the spatial clustering of robbery sensitive to its operationalization? (3) Is the relationship between potentially criminogenic places and robbery sensitive to its operationalization? The results suggest (1) all measures cluster spatially at small units of analysis; (2) while located in spatially proximate areas, differences were seen among the robbery measures and their clusters in terms of their makeup, where they were located, and how many clusters were formed; and (3) all m (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cory Haberman Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Nicholas Corsaro Ph.D. (Committee Member); John Eck Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kenneth Novak Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2017, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Since place-based crime has been studied, scholars have employed a variety of ways to describe the concentration of crime at places. Most usefully, they sometimes provide a full distribution of crime across street segments, or among addresses, or other small geographic areas of interest. This is feasible if the researcher is showing the distribution of crime at places throughout one or two larger areas, such as a city. In such circumstances, a few tables or graphs will be sufficient. But once researchers started looking at spatial areas numbering in the hundreds and thousands, like street segments, then describing the internal distribution of crime within each becomes cumbersome. We need summary measures of crime concentration. The mean, median, and mode are not appropriate for this task: the first two because of the highly skewed nature of crime distributions, and while the mode is better, it does not provide enough information.

Committee: John Eck Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Shane Johnson Ph.D. (Committee Member); Christopher Sullivan Ph.D. (Committee Member); Pamela Wilcox Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Rural Sociology

This study examines the role of a community or place in the social control of crime. The objectives of this study are to answer questions of the where, the why and the how of crime rate variations in rural communities, and if these are associated with different degrees or levels of social control. For the purpose of this dissertation, a community or place is defined as a locality where people interact with each other and share, at least to some extent, a common identity. This study uses a macro-level perspective to study rural community and crime. The unit of analysis is the county, which serves as a proxy for community. It is assumed that county-level social structural and socioeconomic characteristics determine its social integration and social control. Following the tradition of social disorganization theory originating from Shaw and McKay, five macro-level social structural and socioeconomic status characteristics are employed and tested. Social disorganization theory argues that crime is associated with social structural and socioeconomic characteristics that negate or reduce the ability of local groups and individuals to control criminal behavior. This study focuses both on the spatial and temporal differences of nonmetropolitan counties and its consequence for variations in crime rates. A sample of 1,541 nonmetropolitian counties is used in this study. Data of county crime rates is obtained from the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) of FBI. Data of county social structural and socioeconomic characteristics is obtained from the 1990 and 2000 Census of the Population. The Rural-Urban Continuum Codes come from the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the United States of Department of Agriculture, which provides information for the classification of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties. This study adopts multiple regression and structural equation model analyses to test various hypotheses. There are several findings: (1) We confirmed that social disorganization pers (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Joseph F. Donnermeyer (Advisor); Linda Lobao (Committee Member); Flinn William (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Structure

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice

Though there has been considerable research into urban crime, there is little criminological research and theoretical development on central business districts despite the fact these areas are critical in the functioning of cities. In fact, studies often exclude them because of the lack of residential population from which to draw statistical inferences. As a result, theories of urban neighborhoods may have little applicability to central business districts; therefore, little is known about the processes used to control crime and disorder in central business district neighborhoods. The purpose of this study is to address the gap in the crime literature by developing a framework, based in environmental criminology, that will enable researchers to examine central business district crime control processes. The central business district of Cincinnati is used as a single-site case study to determine the framework's ability to identify those crime control processes most likely to work in central business districts and to identify those that do not. Data are drawn from official crime statistics for the City of Cincinnati, other official documentations, direct observations, and interviews with central business district business owners and residents. Findings suggest this framework is appropriate for identifying crime control processes within central business districts. The results of this study will advance our knowledge of effective crime prevention strategies in areas where issues of ownership and crime control are less clear-cut.

Committee: John Eck PhD (Committee Chair); Tamara Madensen PhD (Committee Member); James Frank PhD (Committee Member); Pamela Wilcox PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology