Urban murder rate rise concentrated in already dangerous areas

"Murders Are Rising the Most in a Few Isolated Precincts of Major Cities," Wall Street Journal

From the article:

A murder wave in U.S. cities that started last year is carrying forward into 2021, and a growing body of research shows a pattern behind the rise: It has been concentrated in relatively few poor neighborhoods, typically Black and Hispanic, with persistent histories of violence. 

As elected officials and communities search for solutions, recognizing this geographical reality is essential, say social scientists and police officials who have studied the murder wave. Police and other city authorities will need to focus their efforts on a few areas that have missed out on the urban renaissance of the past two decades as their middle-class residents have fled. ... 

Homicide is up 9.1% in New York so far this year and 22% so far in Chicago, following double-digit increases in both places and in many other cities last year. Mr. Ludwig calculates that nearly three-quarters of Chicago’s homicide increase in 2020 was concentrated in a cluster of eight of the city’s 25 police districts, mostly in the city’s predominantly Black South Side and largely Hispanic West Side. 

Similar patterns have shown up elsewhere. ... 

Mr. Ludwig describes the pattern as a little-noticed new form of inequality—one of public safety. In 1985, he said, the most violent neighborhoods in Chicago had about twice as many murders per capita as safer ones. In recent years that difference stretched in some places to 16 to 1—making the problem an epidemic in some neighborhoods and hardly on the radar in others. 

“The rising inequality of safety means that people in the most impacted areas have fewer and fewer allies who also care about this,” he said. 

For much of the past 20 years, violent crime receded in American cities. A range of factors led to the decline, including the waning of a national crack cocaine epidemic. Some places gentrified, drawing in business and more affluent residents, but others lost people and became even more isolated, segregated and poor. Many of these areas saw hospitals, schools, churches and businesses—the institutions that tie a place together and create order—shut down. Losing that social and economic infrastructure left them prone to gangs and violence.

-- "The opportunity to rearticulate public safety delivery keeps being presented," 2021

Most academics excoriate "broken windows" theory, which got transmogrified into arresting people for any kind of offense.  I agree with the premise of End of Policing, that too many social problems have been criminalized, and that police response doesn't solve anything.

To me, broken windows theory is about the need for community investment, that communities don't deteriorate if they are not disinvested.

"Social urbanism" is a theoretical and practical approach that provides a way to shape and target such investments in communities.

-- "Yes, public and nonprofit investments in the city spur further reinvestment and change: is this a bad thing or a complicated thing?," 2019
-- ""Utility" infrastructure as an opportunity for co-locating urban design and placemaking improvements," 2020
-- "Social urbanism and Baltimore," 2019
-- "The need for a "national" neighborhood stabilization program comparable to the Main Street program for commercial districts: Part I (Overall)," 2020