scholarly journals Evolving Patterns of Aggression: Investigating the Structure of Gang Violence during the Era of Civil Gang Injunctions

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 203
Author(s):  
Gisela Bichler ◽  
Alexis Norris ◽  
Citlalik Ibarra
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Transitive Closure ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Attack Behavior ◽  
Street Gangs ◽  
Gang Injunctions ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Mapping the structural characteristics of attack behavior, this study explores how violent conflict evolved with the implementation of civil gang injunctions (CGIs). Networks were generated by linking defendants and victims named in 963 prosecutions involving street gangs active in the City of Los Angeles (1998–2013). Aggregating directed ties to 318 groups associated with the combatants, we compare four observations that correspond with distinct phases of CGI implementation—development (1998–2001), assent (2002–2005), maturity (2006–2009), and saturation (2010–2013). Using a triad census to calculate a ratio of simple patterns (retaliation, directed lines, and out-stars) to complex three-way interactions, we observed that CGIs were associated with a substantive thickening of conflict—greater complexity was found in conflict relations over time. Dissecting the nature of change, stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs) show that enjoined gangs are more likely to initiate transitive closure. The findings suggest that crime control efforts must make regular adjustments in response to the evolving structure of gang interactions.

The Impact of Civil Gang Injunctions on Networked Violence Between the Bloods and the Crips

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (7) ◽  
pp. 875-915 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisela Bichler ◽  
Alexis Norris ◽  
Jared R. Dmello ◽  
Jasmin Randle
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Violent Crime ◽  
Hierarchical Structures ◽  
Attack Behavior ◽  
Gang Violence ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Dynamic Web ◽  
Gang Injunctions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Comparing the centrality of gangs and changing structure in attack behavior, this study examines the effects of civil gang injunctions (CGIs) on violence involving 23 gangs (seven Bloods and 16 Crips) operating in Southern California. We mapped violence networks by linking defendants and victims named in 272 court cases prosecuted in the City of Los Angeles (1997-2015), involving at least one conviction for a violent crime and a defendant tried as an adult. The results show that a small number of gangs are centrally located in a dynamic web of non-reciprocated conflict that exhibited complex hierarchical structures. These results raise four implications for combating gang violence.

Looking for Nature in LA

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 122-128
Author(s):  
Lila Higgins ◽  
Emily Hartop
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Geographic Variations ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Science Project ◽  
Citizen Science Project ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is reconnecting to the city around it and in the process discovering a vital role for itself in the life of the city and its future. This article’s authors both work for the museum. Lila Higgins describes a Los Angeles teeming with nature, often hidden in plain sight. Emily Hartop describes the museum’s ongoing citizen science project BioSCAN, which is collecting insect specimens around the city on an unprecedented scale to understand not just the full array of insect species living in the city but using geographic variations and changes over time to paint a more complete picture of the city’s ecologies.

Return to the City of Quartz: Excavating the Future 20 Years On

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-87
Author(s):  
Alexander R. Tarr
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Mike Davis ◽  
American Cities ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

This paper revisits Mike Davis’ seminal City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles twenty years after it was originally published. It argues that the book continues to provide an indispensable model for left, politically engaged forms of urban research. The paper criticizes the apocalyptic readings of City of Quartz that have multiplied over time and instead suggests that Davis be read for his emphasis on an urban dialectic—the constant and ongoing struggles over urban form, politics and culture that shape the geographies of Los Angeles to this day. To this end, the paper looks to the city's more recent history, especially current battles being fought over the future of downtown L.A., to illustrate how we might continue to use Davis’ framework for critical analyses of urban power. At the same time, the paper addresses inadequacies of what has been called the “L.A. School” and its singularly postmodern approach to urban questions that fail to provide coherent understanding of the material realities of modern American cities. It argues that something like an L.A. School can be more properly grounded in the historical-materialist, even socialist, forms of writing and thinking developed in works like City of Quartz and much of the critical urban geography that came in its footsteps. Ultimately the paper is a call for scholarship on Los Angeles to be deeply engaged with both the concrete and abstract dimensions of a place, not for the sake of theory alone, but to further radical praxis in Los Angeles and all American cities.

Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change: Houston, Flooding, and the Case of Federal Buyouts

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Loughran ◽  
James R. Elliott ◽  
S. Wright Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Ecology ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
First Century ◽  
Urban Flooding ◽  
The Social ◽  
Residential Properties ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over recent decades. Drawing on data from Houston, Texas, we locate where these buyout zones have emerged and how their social ecologies have changed in ways that feed back to influence the number of local buyouts that occur. Results indicate that Houston’s buyout zones have an identifiable social ecology that has shifted over time, primarily from white to Hispanic working-class settlement as the city has grown and become more racially and ethnically diverse. Results also show that the extent to which this racial succession has occurred powerfully predicts subsequent numbers of buyouts in the area. Implications for developing an enhanced urban ecology for the twenty-first century are discussed.

Seasonal Variation of Suicide in the City of São Paulo, Brazil, 1996–2010

Crisis ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Hideki Bando ◽  
Fernando Madalena Volpe
Keyword(s):  
Seasonal Pattern ◽  
Total Sample ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Seasonal Patterns ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Health Statistics ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
June July ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Background: In light of the few reports from intertropical latitudes and their conflicting results, we aimed to replicate and update the investigation of seasonal patterns of suicide occurrences in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Methods: Data relating to male and female suicides were extracted from the Mortality Information Enhancement Program (PRO-AIM), the official health statistics of the municipality of São Paulo. Seasonality was assessed by studying distribution of suicides over time using cosinor analyses. Results: There were 6,916 registered suicides (76.7% men), with an average of 39.0 ± 7.0 observed suicides per month. For the total sample and for both sexes, cosinor analysis estimated a significant seasonal pattern. For the total sample and for males suicide peaked in November (late spring) with a trough in May–June (late autumn). For females, the estimated peak occurred in January, and the trough in June–July. Conclusions: A seasonal pattern of suicides was found for both males and females, peaking in spring/summer and dipping in fall/winter. The scarcity of reports from intertropical latitudes warrants promoting more studies in this area.

Utopian Visions in United States Urbanism

Moreana ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (Number 164) (4) ◽  
pp. 157-186
Author(s):  
James M. McCutcheon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
New World ◽  
New Technology ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Garden Cities ◽  
Oneida Community ◽  
The City

America’s appeal to Utopian visionaries is best illustrated by the Oneida Community, and by Etienne Cabet’s experiment (Moreana 31/215 f and 43/71 f). A Messianic spirit was a determinant in the Puritans’ crossing the Atlantic. The Edenic appeal of the vast lands in a New World to migrants in a crowded Europe is obvious. This article documents the ambition of urbanists to preserve that rural quality after the mushrooming of towns: the largest proved exemplary in bringing the country into the city. New York’s Central Park was emulated by the open spaces on the grounds of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The garden-cities surrounding London also provided inspiration, as did the avenues by which Georges Haussmann made Paris into a tourist mecca, and Pierre L’Enfant’s designs for the nation’s capital. The author concentrates on two growing cities of the twentieth century, Los Angeles and Honolulu. His detailed analysis shows politicians often slow to implement the bold and costly plans of designers whose ambition was to use the new technology in order to vie with the splendor of the natural sites and create the “City Beautiful.” Some titles in the bibliography show the hopes of those dreamers to have been tempered by fears of “supersize” or similar drawbacks.

Los Angeles in the 1930sThe WPA Guide to the City of Angels

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federal Writers Project of the Works ◽  
David Kipen
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
The City

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Városutópiák környezetpszichológiai és szimbolikai elemzése

2003 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edit Lippai ◽  
Andrea Dúll
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Jersey City ◽  
The City

A városépítészet egész történetét végigkísérik a „Jó város - jó társadalom” elképzelések, vagyis az utópiák. A jelen tanulmányban néhány, a szépirodalomban megjelent ideális, tökéletes, kívánt városelképzelést, vagyis eutópiát elemzünk környezetpszichológiai és szimbolikai szempontból. A városok tényleges téri-társadalmi szerkezetének és folyamatainak, valamint ezek mentális-érzelmi leképezodésének vizsgálata egyidos a környezetpszichológiával. A kutatást Kevin Lynch (1960) úttöro vizsgálatai alapozták meg, amelyeket „A város képe” (The Image of the City) címu klasszikus könyvében publikált. Lynch három amerikai város - Boston, Los Angeles és Jersey City - lakosságának reprezentatív mintáin végzett kutatásában a lakók mentális térképeit vizsgálta. Kutatásának eredményei szerint az emberek fejében él egy kép a városukról (image of the city), ami a városlakó orientációs bázisa és egyúttal esztétikai-formai struktúra. Összehasonlítva a három amerikai városról alkotott mentális térképeket, Lynch rájött, hogy bizonyos környezeti elemek általános térkép-jellegzetességnek tekinthetok: utak (paths), határok (edges), lakónegyedek (districts), csomópontok (nodes), iránypontok (landmarks). Az utópiák három csoportra oszthatók: idobeli (múlt- és a jövobeli), térbeli (négy világtáj irányában, illetve magasban vagy mélyben levo) és abszolút (képzeletbeli) utópiákra. Az általunk elemzett idobeli utópiák: Atlantisz, Mennyei Jeruzsálem, Minas Tirith és Diaspar, térbeli utópiák: Nekeresd, Napváros, Eldorado és abszolút utópia: Elefántcsonttorony. Ezeket a városutópiákat ebben a munkában kulturális városképeknek tekintettük, és ily módon elemeztük fizikai, észlelheto elemeiket. Vizsgálatunk során arra az érdekes felfedezésre bukkantunk - természetesen Lynch munkájáról nem is tudva -, hogy az utópiák megalkotói pontosan az általuk empirikusan feltárt fenti szempontok alapján írták le információikat az általuk tökéletesnek tartott városról. Elemzésünk eredménye szerint leírhatók a vágyott város ismérvei általában: 1. széles, jó alapanyagból készült sugárutak, 2. jól elkülönített határok és szélek, amelyek védenek, s tagolják a város szerkezetét és 3. a városon belül tágas tereket, kerületeket fognak közre, valamint 4. a csomópontokban a vizuális tájékozódást segíto jellegzetes és látványos tereptárgy van. A városok lakóit többek között közös szimbólumrendszer és a kommunikáció adott, megszokott módja kapcsolja egymáshoz. Az utópikus városok szimbolikus „kognitív térképeinek” funkciója - a valós városokéhoz hasonlóan - az lehet, hogy keretet és biztonságos kapaszkodót nyújtanak egy ideális világban, megteremtik az arról való közös kommunikáció lehetoségét, és ily módon kifejezik, létrehozzák és fenntartják az emberek vágyott tökéletes helykötodését és helyidentitását.

СТРУКТУРА, МОДЕЛИ И СТРАТЕГИИ УЧАСТИЯ ГОРОДСКИХ СООБЩЕСТВ В КОНФЛИКТАХ

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
А. И. Кольба ◽  
Н. В. Кольба
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
City Government ◽  
Expert Interviews ◽  
Competitive Strategies ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
The City

The article describes the structural characteristics of the urban communities of the city of Krasnodar and the related features that impact their participation in urban conflicts. This issue is considered in a number of scientific publications, but there is a need to expand the empirical base of such studies. On the base of expert interviews conducted with both city activists, their counterparty (representatives of the municipal government) and external observers (journalists), the parameters of urban communities functioning in the process of their interaction with other conflict actors are revealed. The communities characteristics such as the predominantly territorial principle of formation, the overlap of online and offline communications in their activities, the presence of a “core” with a relatively low number of permanent participants and others are determined. Their activities are dominated by neighborly and civilian models of participation in conflicts. The possibilities of realizing one’s own interests through political interactions (participation in elections, the activities of representative bodies of power, political parties) are not yet sufficiently understood. Urban communities, as a rule, operate within the framework of conventional forms of participation in solving urgent problems, although in some cases it is possible to use confrontational methods, in particular, protest ones. In this regard, the most often used compromise, with the desire for cooperation, a strategy of behavior in interaction with opponents. The limited activating role of conflicts in the activities of communities has been established. The weak manifestation of the civil and especially political component in their activities determines the preservation of a low level of political subjectivity. This factor restrains the growth of urban communities resources and the possibility of applying competitive strategies in interaction with city government and business.

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