Context and Spatial Nuance Inside a Neighborhood's Drug Hotspot: Implications for the Crime–Health Nexus

Andrew Curtis, Jacqueline W. Curtis, Lauren C. Porter, Eric Jefferis and Eric Shook

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016, vol. 106, issue 4, 819-836

Abstract: New geographic approaches are required to tease apart the underlying sociospatial complexity of neighborhood decline to target appropriate interventions. Typically maps of crime hotspots are used with relatively little attention being paid to geographic context. This article helps further this discourse using a topical study of a neighborhood drug microspace, a phrase we use to include the various stages of production, selling, acquiring, and taking, to show how context matters. We overlay an exploratory data analysis of three cohort spatial video geonarratives (SVGs) to contextualize the traditional crime rate hotspot maps. Using two local area analyses of police, community, and ex-offender SVGs and then comparing these with police call for service data, we identify spaces of commonality and difference across data types. In the Discussion, we change the scale to consider revealed microspaces and the interaction of both “good” and “bad” places. We enrich the previous analysis with a mapped spatial video assessment of the built environment and then return to the narrative to extract additional detail around a crime-associated corner store next to a community center. Our findings suggest that researchers should reevaluate how to enrich typical hotspot approaches with more on-the-ground context.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2016.1164582 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:106:y:2016:i:4:p:819-836

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1164582

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().