Markia Silverman-Rodriguez, “Racial Residential Segregation in Hotspots of Crime Incidents in Chicago from 1970 to 2010”
Mentor: Zengwang Xu, Geography

In cities around the globe, there exists a significant correlation between racial residential segregation and crime. Numerous studies indicate that affluent, white neighborhoods have lower crime rates than neighborhoods mainly inhabited by minority residents, and that crime rates decrease as racial residential segregation decreases. This pattern is most likely the result of widespread socioeconomic disadvantage in minority neighborhoods due to deeply rooted issues of systemic racism, such as discrimination from landlords, banks, and employers. Moreover, as a neighborhood’s crime rates increase, the inhabitants that can afford to move away—often affluent white residents—do so, further intensifying patterns of racial residential segregation, socioeconomic disadvantage, and crime. While the relationship between racial residential segregation and crime has been studied in depth, researchers have often used arbitrary boundaries such as zip codes or census tracts to examine the two factors. However, using these socially meaningless divisions for calculations of racial residential segregation can lead to serious inaccuracies. In this research project, we examine the association between racial residential segregation and crime specifically in the city of Chicago, Illinois by using hotspots of crime incidents rather than the aforementioned over-relied-upon census tract boundaries. Using the statistical programming language R as well as ArcGIS Pro—a software for creating maps and analyzing geographical information—we examine U.S. Census data from 1970 to 2010, alongside Chicago Police Department crime incident data from 2001 to 2017. We expect to find that areas of persistently high crime rates also have increasingly high rates of racial residential segregation.