New Study Linking Blight and Homicide May Help Predict Where Murder May Occur
02/08/2019
BATON ROUGE – A new study led by LSU Department of Sociology Assistant Professor Matthew
Valasik is the first to show a statistical connection between homicide, blighted buildings
and convenience stores in Baton Rouge. Valasik, doctoral candidate in sociology Elizabeth
Brault and his former student Stephen Martinez, who is now an investigator in the
East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s office looked at where homicides occurred in
the city in 2016. They found that nearly 25 percent of homicides in Baton Rouge take
place within the same areas that comprise about 3 percent of the city.
They applied a computational model that ran 18 different environmental risk factors
on the locations of homicides that occurred in 2016. The results showed that in Baton
Rouge, homicide occurs most commonly in areas where blighted buildings are concentrated
as well as within close proximity to convenience stores. This new study was published
recently in the journal Social Science Research.
The researchers mapped out the city to identify where blighted buildings and convenience
stores are clustered. Then, they overlaid where homicides occurred the next year,
in 2017. The results were stark.
“If you are within a three and a half block radius of a convenience store, the risk
of homicide increases five-fold. Similarly, if you live within two and a half blocks
of a blighted building, the risk increases by 13 times,” Valasik said.
He is the first to study how the physical landscape and built environment in Baton
Rouge correlates with crime.
“The collection of these places make it very easy for crime to take place,” Valasik
said. “They’re usually abandoned or out of sight from the rest of the neighborhood
and from the police, and it becomes very easy for crime to ensue.”
The process he applied is called risk terrain modeling, or RTM, which computes environmental
risk factors based on 18 physical locations including schools, liquor stores, banks,
blighted buildings, convenience stores and more. The model assigns each factor a relative
risk score. Factors with higher risk scores mean those factors are more likely to
be associated with higher criminal activity. Blight, which the researchers define
as “hazardous to the health, safety or welfare of the public, and/or conditions which
are detrimental to property values, economic stability or to the quality of the environment,”
is a growing problem in the U.S.
The researchers note that although blight has plagued many declining cities in the
past, it has become even more pronounced across the country since the housing bubble
burst and the recession.
By pinpointing where crime is highest in the city and linking important environmental
factors, Valasik is hoping his research can be useful to state and local officials
to try and combat crime in the capital city.
“With all of my research, I try to provide how we can eliminate the blight to make
communities safer,” Valasik said. “With this data, we can look at the areas that are
most at-risk and try to change the blighted spaces into places more useful for the
community.”
Additional Link:
Forecasting homicide in the red stick: Risk terrain modeling and the spatial influence of urban blight on lethal violence in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Social Science Research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X18307038
Contact Alison Satake
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3870
asatake@lsu.edu