My article examining spatial shifts in shootings in Buffalo pre/post Covid, in collaboration with several of my Buffalo colleagues, is now published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology (Drake et al., 2022).

If you do not have access to that journal, you can always just email, or check out the open access pre-print. About the only difference is a supplement we added in response to reviewers, including maps of different grid cell areas, here is a hex grid version of the changes:

The idea behind this paper was to see if given the dramatic increase in shootings in Buffalo after Covid started (Kim & Phillips, 2021), they about doubled (similar to NYC), did spatial hot spots change? The answer is basically no (and I did a similar analysis in NYC as well).

While other papers have pointed out that crime increases disproportionately impact minority communities (Schleimer et al., 2022), which is true, it stands to be very specific what the differences in my work and this are saying. Imagine we have two neighborhoods:

Neighborhood A, Disadvantaged/Minority, Pre 100 crimes, Post 200 crimes
Neighborhood B,    Advantaged/Majority, Pre   1 crimes, Post   2 crimes

The work that I have done has pointed to these increases due to Covid being that relative proportions/rates are about the same (shootings ~doubled in both Buffalo/NYC). And that doubling was spread out pretty much everywhere. It is certainly reasonable to interpret this as an increased burden in minority communities, even if proportional trends are the same everywhere.

This proportional change tends to occur when crime declines as well (e.g. Weisburd & Zastrow, 2022; Wheeler et al., 2016). And this just speaks to the stickiness of hot spots of crime. Even with large macro changes in temporal crime trends, crime hot spots are very durable over time. So I really think it makes the most sense for police departments to have long term strategies to deal with hot spots of crime, and they don’t need to change targeted areas very often.

References

• Drake, G., Wheeler, A., Kim, D. Y., Phillips, S. W., & Mendolera, K. (2022). The Impact of COVID-19 on the Spatial Distribution of Shooting Violence in Buffalo, NY. Journal of Experimental Criminology Online First.
• Kim, D. Y., & Phillips, S. W. (2021). When COVID-19 and guns meet: A rise in shootings. Journal of Criminal Justice, 73, 101783.
• Schleimer, J. P., Buggs, S. A., McCort, C. D., Pear, V. A., Biasi, A. D., Tomsich, E., … & Wintemute, G. J. (2022). Neighborhood racial and economic segregation and disparities in violence during the CoViD-19 pandemic. American Journal of Public Health, 112(1), 144-153.
• Weisburd, D., & Zastrow, T. (2022). Does a Large Crime Decline Mean That Hot Spots of Crime Are No Longer ‘Hot’?: Evidence from a Study of New York City Street Segments. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice Online First.
• Wheeler, A. P., Worden, R. E., & McLean, S. J. (2016). Replicating group-based trajectory models of crime at micro-places in Albany, NY. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 32(4), 589-612.