Bettering Boston
A database for vetting neighborhood violence.
By April Pattavina
In the field of criminal justice, there is often
a tension between those who conduct pure research and those who do applied
research. Applied researchers, who focus on practical or policy-relevant
issues, claim that pure researchers are often preoccupied with the abstract
and that their work has little practical relevance for the everyday operation
of the criminal justice system. Pure researchers, who pursue knowledge
for the purpose of advancing science, argue that applied researchers conduct
studies without adequate theoretical or methodological foundations.
Northeastern is one place that attempts to bridge
these two seemingly opposite approaches to the study of social problems.
This philosophy of combining theory and practice is what attracted me to
this university, first as a graduate student and now as a faculty member
in the College of Criminal Justice. As a graduate student, I was fortunate
to work at N.U.'s Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research. There, I
not only came to appreciate the importance of linking criminal justice
theory and practice, but also was granted a wonderful opportunity to help
make it happen in ways that will benefit families and children living in
disadvantaged communities in Boston.
In 1992, Northeastern, the Boston Foundation,
the University of MassachusettsBoston, and Lotus Development Corporation
embarked on a collaborative effort to build a database consisting of neighborhood-level
information for assessing the economic, social, health, and safety status
of Boston neighborhoods. Public agencies and private companies, including
the Boston Police Department, Boston Public Schools, the Massachusetts
Office of Child Care Services, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health,
the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy, the Boston
Assessing Department, and Coles Business Directory, gave us information
on topics such as crime, emergency room admissions, births, child-care
facilities, school performance of children, property type and assessment,
and businesses. This information was supplemented with U.S. Census data
on demographics such as employment, household income, family structure,
education levels, and population. The basic idea was to aggregate the data
to the neighborhood level and release it to Boston communities for use
in neighborhood advocacy and planning.
This database is important for a number of reasons.
First is to gain a better understanding of the persistent nature of poverty
in some of Boston's neighborhoods by examining the distribution of social,
economic, and health conditions across neighborhoods and studying the relationship
between neighborhood problems and community characteristics. Second, the
only official source of neighborhood-level data is the federal census,
which is conducted once every ten years and is limited in its capacity
to address issues specific to Boston neighborhoods. The third reason involves
the changing nature of the government's involvement in community development.
The federal government has shifted more responsibility for community development
to the state and local levels. As a result, it has become apparent that
locally based information about Boston communities is crucial to the future
of community development and change in Boston.
I was the technical director for the project under
the guidance of Glenn Pierce, codirector of the Center for Criminal Justice
Policy Research. With the Boston Foundation, the contributing public agencies,
and Boston community groups, we agreed upon a list of neighborhood-level
indicators that provided the most descriptive and useful information necessary
for community planning. At Northeastern, we developed the final database,
which ultimately consisted of more than 700 neighborhood-level indicators,
focusing on areas such as violence, unemployment, and school performance.
Most of the indicators are available for multiyear periods.
This project has created wonderful opportunities
for research and teaching. As a graduate student in the Law, Policy, and
Society program, which is housed within the College of Arts and Sciences,
I used some of the database information for my doctoral dissertation. I
was particularly interested in the relationship between neighborhood violence
and children's performance in school. I found that the level of neighborhood
violence negatively affects the standardized test scores of middle school
and high school children, even after accounting for other neighborhood,
school, and individual factors. I plan to expand this research by examining
the relationship between neighborhood violence and school dropout rates.
These findings demonstrate the importance of considering
neighborhood crime as both a cause and consequence in the study of child
development. This focus opens up many possibilities for intervention, especially
at a time when we are trying to understand the increasing involvement of
children in violence. The results suggest that exposure to neighborhood
violence is most acute for middle school children. Targeting violence intervention
toward this age group may result in more efficient use of scarce resources.
Moreover, now that the data are available over periods of time, it is possible
to evaluate social interventions that are targeted toward areas with high
levels of violence.
As a new criminal justice faculty member, I am
finding many opportunities to use the database and my research in my teaching.
I am planning a graduate course that draws heavily on the database for
assessing public safety concerns in Boston neighborhoods. Students in the
course will use the data to plan and evaluate community policing initiatives.
In addition, they will employ computer mapping technology for investigating
the relationship between community conditions and crime.
The construction of the database has been a success,
but some other important challenges lie ahead. One important criticism
is that the database overemphasizes the negative aspects of Boston neighborhoods.
Some argue that it is equally important to include "assets" of
communities. In response, we are looking to incorporate more information
about the positive aspects of communities in future releases of the database.
The huge amount of information in the database
has been overwhelming to many people who are interested in using the data
but have limited technical and analytic skills. Recently, Alan Saiz of
N.U.'s geology department and I worked with Lotus to design a user interface
that makes the database easy to use, even for those without computer skills.
Lotus's corporate philanthropy program provides free Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet
software and training for anyone interested in using the database.
The database project continues to expand with
the use of computer mapping technology, a project in which the geology
department has been heavily involved. Northeastern's sociology and anthropology
departments and the School of Law have used the database either for their
own research or for securing external funding for projects. More N.U. students
are getting involved in the technical development of the database and are
helping to put in place a system for generating the database on an annual
basis. Northeastern and the Boston Foundation are cooperating in developing
World Wide Web sites for distributing the data. UMassBoston's Community
Action Information Network has provided training workshops to assist community
groups in working with the data.
I hope my experience will be of value to Northeastern
students and at the same time serve to improve Boston neighborhoods. This
is what linking theory and practice is all about.
April Pattavina, MJ'90, PHD'98, is a visiting
assistant professor in the College of Criminal Justice.
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