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26 Criminology 381 (1988)
Gang Homicide, Delinquency, and Community

handle is hein.journals/crim26 and id is 391 raw text is: GANG HOMICIDE, DELINQUENCY, AND COMMUNITY* G. DAVID CURRY SPSS, Inc. IRVING A. SPERGEL University of Chicago Analysis of community-level data on community areas in Chicago sub- stantiates two conceptual differences. the first, between gang crime and delinquency as community-level phenomena; and the second, between the- oretical associations of each of the former to community-area patterns of social disorganization and poverty. One pattern is more common in Chi- cago's Hispanic communities; the other, in Chicago's black communities. Five measures of the quality of community life used are gang homicide rate, delinquency rate, unemployment rate, percentage living below the poverty level, and mortgage investment per dwelling. Identifying commu- nities as white, black, Hispanic, or mixed and applying discriminant anal- ysis reveal the racial-ethnic communities as distinct social worlds. Regression analyses of gang homicide and delinquency rates show that the two measures display very different patterns of association with other com- munity characteristics. An analysis of the residual change score for gang homicide rate over two time periods indicates the relative stability of com- munity patterns with poverty measures explaining much of the change in patterns. It is concluded that gang homicide rates and delinquency rates are ecologically distinct community problems. The distribution of gang homicide rates conforms to classic theories of social disorganization and poverty, and the distribution of delinquency rates is more generally associ- ated with poverty. BACKGROUND Earlier discussions, using lower class culture and subculture frameworks (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; A. Cohen, 1955; A. Cohen and Short, 1958; Miller, 1958), tend to obscure distinctions between gang and delinquent group behavior (Kornhauser, 1978). A few theorists and researchers (Cart- wright and Howard, 1966; Kornhauser, 1978; Miller 1975; Morash, 1983; * We thank Commander Edward Pleines, Officer Lawrence Bobrowski, Carolyn Rebecca Block, R. Darrell Bock, members of the Methodology Committee weekly seminar at the University of Chicago, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We thank Mark Stevens for his advice on preparing figures and tables. Computations in this research utilize SPSS/PC+. CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 26 NUMBER 3 1988

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