Marco Gomez

Marco Gomez

Word Count 600

Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime

This article is looking at the relation between the neighborhoods racial composition and what people think of the neighborhoods crime problem. This study is conducted by surveying people in 3 cities, Chicago, Baltimore and Seattle and original crime stats gathered from census their police departments. This study states that perceptions of African Americans in neighborhoods affect perceptions of crime level in a positive way. The data found supports that stereotypes influence perceptions of level of crimes in neighborhoods.

Data and Methods

The data the researchers used in this article were gathered from 3 studies. The studies that were used are as followed: The Crime Factors and Neighborhood Decline in Chicago, the Testing Theories of Criminality and Victimization in Seattle, and Crime Changes in Baltimore. The Chicago data came from phone surveys conducted with about 3,300 of people of households in eight Chicago communities. The interviewees were asked questions about their neighborhoods and their perception of crime in them. The Seattle study came from interviews of 5,302 people in 100 Seattle neighborhoods. The survey focused on individual attitudes and experiences. The Baltimore study came from interviewing 704 people in 30 Baltimore neighborhoods. For the Chicago and Seattle studies more info was gathered from census and stats of crime from their police departments, this was not available for the Baltimore study.

Findings

In Chicago study it showed that there was a strong relation between young black men between 12 and 29 years and perceptions of a neighborhood's crime problem. As suspected here neighborhoods with a higher percent of young black men have higher perceived rates of crime, even when using variables. Seattle and Baltimore found to each have less measures of perceived crime than Chicago. The findings found here still showed that as the black population increased, so did the perception of crime in the neighborhoods.