Immigration and Gun Homicides: The Evidence and Policing Implications

Police officers understand evidence.  From their time in the police academy to the first time they testify in court, even traffic court, an officer understands the importance of providing clear provable information.  The evidence has to contribute to an argument that something is more than likely than not to be true.  But when we to listen to news reports they are going to focus on the most serious issues.  Unfortunately, the most serious issues are not the most common.  In academics we call this "an N of 1."  This does not stop people, the news media, or politicians from exploiting that single incident.  But this is not evidence.  The entire policing field understands the N of 1, because the field of policing can be targeted based on the behavior of a single officer.  Whether the behavior is justified or corrupt, that single incident is thrown about as something common to policing.  Again, this is not evidence.  On today’s episode we’re going to be speaking with Calvin Proffit about the true nature of immigration and its relationship to crime.  This is often discussed in the media, but we’re going to look at what the research evidences tells us about this issue.  Calvin is a PhD candidate in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.  Calvin is the lead author of “Gun Violence in the Age of Mass Migration: An Empirical Assessment of Immigration Effects on U.S. County-Level Firearm Homicides, 2000–2015,” which was published just a month or so ago.

Main Topics

• This research is a macro examination of crime patters across locations and demographics.
• Thirty years of research shows immigration insulates a neighborhood from crime. 
• “Immigrant Revitalization” can decrease gang and gun violence.
• The macro level data finds a negative relationship between gun homicides and immigrant populations.
• When it comes to “gang-related” violence, this seems to be a unique problem.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:12

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street level police officers and command staff alike. The program is intended to help the police and law enforcement community create better programs, understand challenging policies, and dispel the myths of police officer behavior. I'm your host, Scott Phillips. Police officers understand evidence. From their time in the police academy to their first time they testify in court, even traffic court, an officer understands the importance of providing clear, provable information. The evidence has to contribute to an argument that something is more likely than not to be true. Even without direct empirical data, police officers working in the street have a sense of what's going on where they work. They have a sense of hot spots in their beat, and they know most of the players who cause most of the problems. Their evidence is their direct experience. Still, officers are subject to what's called selective interaction. That is, in some locations, particularly larger cities, they may know what's important to their beat, but they are likely to believe what other officers tell them about the other locations when they don't have their own direct knowledge. Now the same argument can be applied to the general public. We know what's important on our street or where we live, but we listen to the news and about other locations, and those media reports are going to focus on the most serious issues. So if I live in a city with some amount of crime, even if I live nowhere near it, I may think I'm in a little bit of danger. Fortunately, the most serious issues are not the most common. In academics, this is called an N of one. This does not stop, however, people or particularly the news media or politicians from exploiting that single incident. But this is not evidence. The police profession itself understands the N of one. The entire field of policing can be tainted based upon the behavior of a single officer. Whether that behavior is justified or corrupt, that single incident is thrown about as if it is something common to policing. Again, this is not evidence. On today's episode of the Police and Service Training Podcast, we're going to be speaking with Calvin Prophet about the true nature of immigration and its relationship to crime. This is often discussed in the media, but we're going to be looking at what the research evidence tells us about the issue. Calvin is a PhD student in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He studies patterns of crime across demographic groups and technology and policing. Calvin is the lead author of Gun Violence in the Age of Mass Migration, an empirical assessment of immigration effects on U.S. County Level Firearm Homicide 2000 to 2015, which was published just a few months ago. Thanks for joining the podcast, Calvin. Well, I'm glad you could join us. Now, you are still a graduate student who uh is working on your dissertation. Now you've studied gang homicide and crime during COVID. What drew you to this line of study?

Speaker 1 3:34

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, you know, let me talk a little bit. You know, my research focuses on macro-level patterns of crime across communities. Uh, you know, macro means that we're looking at neighborhoods, cities, counties rather than individual level offenders. And it's with a particular focus on race, ethnicity, and immigration. You know, I was drawn to this line of inquiry after taking a seminar in my master's uh course uh in racing crime from Dr. Feldmeyer, who is my co-author on this paper and is actually my uh faculty advisor. Um I enjoy examining the nuance of crime patterns and understanding why some places experience more crime than others, and how crime affects certain groups more so than others. And as you mentioned, I've done some work examining gang homicides across different places and how COVID influenced arrest patterns across race groups, and in particular how immigration patterns are or are not related to crime patterns and violence.

Speaker 4:26

Now, why is this particular issue, this issue of immigration and crime, why is this area of inquiry of importance or relevance to the police?

Speaker 1 4:34

Yeah, so immigration and its relationship with crime, it's an important topic because there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding immigration, which ultimately, you know, it shapes policy, budget allocations, and how the public views immigration in the lens of public safety. You know, a bit of a spoiler, which I know we're gonna get into more in a second here, um, but uh um the research the last 30 plus years has pretty consistently found that immigration is unrelated to crime, and if anything, it actually helps insulate or protect places from serious violence and general crime. You know, in terms of its relevance to policing, this line of research helps us understand that if if we want to combat violence, and uh in the case of this, you know, specifically gun violence, immigration enforcement is is not really gonna markedly reduce this form of violence, you know, which I'm happy to speak more on when we get into the study.

Speaker 5:20

Okay, so let's jump into this. Now, your study focused on immigration and gun violence. Now, before we get to that specific narrow topic, uh, what can you tell us about the past research on immigration and uh informal social control in general?

Speaker 1 5:35

Yeah, yeah. So I think the best way to kind of understand immigration and informal social control is through what we call the immigrant revitalization thesis. As I briefly spoiled earlier, this largely shows, or research largely shows, that immigration is more likely to revitalize or protect communities from crime and violence than it is to generate these social harms. Um, you know, the immigrant revitalization thesis, it helps us understand why this is the case. So this thesis focuses on aspects of immigration or immigrants themselves, and why many immigrants are less crime prone, or why immigration as a social process is actually a protective factor. You know, at the individual level, when we're looking at a specific person, you know, many immigrant families bring characteristics that are associated with lower offending, such as strong family ties, strong work ethics, an emphasis on education and close-knit social networks in particular. You know, parents often place high value on school, employment, and in staying connected to the family, which can reduce opportunities for delinquency among immigrant youth. And when we think about immigration at the community level, this theory argues that immigration doesn't weaken neighborhoods. It can actually strengthen them. As immigrant families settle in an area, they often build businesses, they fill jobs that many Americans might not want, they invest in their neighborhoods, and they create strong social networks in their immigrant dense communities. And those networks help neighbors look out for one another, support local families, increase informal social control. And over time, these factors are what make communities more stable and in many cases less violent. And so instead of viewing immigration as something that fuels crime, the evidence in this theory suggests that it's actually part of what helps neighborhoods thrive.

Speaker 7:16

I'm suddenly reminded, and I don't I don't want to get too personal here, but um I was born in the in the early very early 60s, and my grandparents actually came here from Germany. And um well, they came to the Niagara Falls area and they moved into the the German area. Now Niagara Falls at that time, now a lot of larger cities had these kinds of you know, the you know, immigrant neighborhood, the Polish community, the Italian neighborhood, whatever the case may be. And that was the thing with the the the Germans were they liked each other, they they re-established the norms that they brought with them about you know going to church and there was the corner store down the street. Now that wasn't a corner store, it was I swear this was the dude's name, Grobengieser and Son. Now I've never looked at the ethnicity of that, but I'm reminded of those are the kinds of things in that particular neighborhood that made it strong. There was no fear at all. Okay, enough for the flashback to the 60s. When it comes to immigration, now particularly with the violent crime, the immigrant and violent crime relationship, what does the, again, the prior research tell us?

Speaker 1 8:15

Yeah, so when research has examined immigration and violent crime, which at this point it has pretty pretty plentifully, um, it has painted a fairly consistent picture. Uh in fact, there was a meta-analysis conducted in 2018 by a couple leading immigration scholars that looked at 51 studies of immigration and violent crime. And for those that don't know, a meta-analysis, it's like a it's like a summary of findings from a bunch of studies. Like what's the average effect of immigration on crime, in this case violent crime, across a ton of different studies. And it's it's great for looking at like big picture rather than just looking at one or two individual studies. Yeah. So anyway, they they looked at 51 studies of immigration and violent crime, and they concluded that on average across all these studies, immigration has weak, meaning in this case kind of small, negative effects on violent crime. And in this context, negative means a negative association between immigration and violent crime. In other words, as immigration goes up in a place, violent crime tends to go down. And this is after accounting for a lot of other factors like poverty, unemployment, you know, things of those natures. Um, and we've seen this relationship time and time again. You know, some studies simply find that there's this, you know, no real association between immigration and violence, but a good portion of the literature has really found this inverse effect, suggesting that immigration helps protect places from violent crime.

Speaker 9:32

This is this is fascinating. Because these are the kinds of things that, you know, I don't generally read about, but that's the the nature of this podcast, is it's exposing me to all kinds of interesting things. Okay, so you have a lot of information about immigration and gun crime, gang violence, those kinds of things. Can you give us an overview of any research and how those assumed links are challenged by your immigration revitalization thesis?

Speaker 1 9:58

Yeah, so when people think about immigration and gun violence, gangs kind of become a part of the conversation. Sure. Um and on the surface, there are reasons to expect, uh, or someone might expect a connection. You know, you know, we know gangs are much more likely to use firearms and homicides. Um, and some research has found higher levels of gang membership in immigrant dense communities. Um, some immigrant youth, particularly those who may face barriers to education or employment or barriers to legal status, uh, they may be vulnerable to gang recruitment, as you know, gangs may offer a sense of identity, belonging, a means to, you know, make income in times where they may face these barriers through the immigration process. Right.

Speaker 10:35

It's almost almost a substitute for the the other normal, informal social control.

Speaker 1 10:39

Exactly. Yes, exactly. Yeah. But that's only one side of the story. So the immigrant revitalization perspective, on the other hand, argues that these risks are often outweighed by the broader protective forces within immigrant communities. So again, we think back to our strong family bonds, especially collectivistic culture that's shared among uh Latino or Asian groups, which are two of our biggest groups coming into the United States. You know, those close-knit networks, shared social networks, and high levels of informal social control can really make gang recruitment more difficult. You know, at the same time, immigrant communities often revitalize local economies by opening businesses and filling important jobs, investing in neighborhoods, and these are the kinds of conditions we know help reduce gang activity and gun violence. So while there are plausible reasons to expect immigration to increase firearm violence, you know, decades of research generally points in the opposite direction, suggesting that immigrant communities are often associated with less violence and not more.

Speaker 11:35

I thought it was really interesting to read in your article about uh immigration um destinations and how those might result. And you've kind of been touching on that a little bit, the destinations and how those might result in positive or negative outcomes for the areas. Now, I imagine that the type of location an immigrant moves to impacts the person, and that that there's the another long-term outcome from that. Can you briefly explain that idea of uh destination?

Speaker 1 12:02

So, destination types, it's been a part uh and an important piece of the context in the immigration crime research and the discourse. Um, for listeners who may not know what I'm referring to when I say uh destination type, there are essentially two destination types broadly that we categorize that immigrants select into or settle in. Um, first, there are traditional or established destinations that are long-standing immigration hubs. Think about like Miami, Florida, Chicago, New York, San Diego, you know, strong destinations for uh immigrant families for many, many, many decades. Um, these places have strong networks because of this, and they're immigrant populations, which, you know, help ease the transition from one country to another, but also boosts kind of those effects we've talked about with immigrant revitalization. Um, however, there are also the other side, new destinations, which lack these long-standing immigrant communities. And as such, immigrants arriving in these places may face more barriers to finding jobs or housing or a sense of community, which could leave immigrants and, you know, in this case, more vulnerable to gang recruitment. You know, you kind of think back to some like social disorganization, Sean McKay, a little bit. A new group entering into a place, you know, different cultures, different uh levels of trust in the community and things of that nature. Um, and I will say, kind of also, you know, um, one thing, kind of circling back a little bit to the gang side of this with immigration, there's actually surprisingly little amount of macro-level research examining immigration and its association with gangs. Um, the field could use more. It helps us understand, you know, make stronger understandings of these links between immigration and gangs. Um I actually have another piece that looks specifically at immigration and its association with gang shootings in Chicago, which I'm happy to circle back to at the end if we have some time.

Speaker 13:40

Okay, so let's let's make sure we have the time. Sure to discuss that. Let's let's get into the study that we're talking about here. Absolutely. What was the basic research question? Because I I like it when when the authors tell me what their research question was, so this way I'm not goofing it up, and where did you get your data?

Speaker 1 13:56

So at the most basic level, our research question asks what's the association between immigration and firearm homicide specifically? A lot of research has looked at homicide generally, but as we've already kind of discussed, you know, this could look differently when we think about gun violence specifically based on the supposed connections between immigration and gangs. Um in addition, we also wanted to look at Hispanic or Latino immigration specifically to see if there was unique relationship there. So we're looking at overall immigrant populations as well as that specific group, uh, since they are the leading dominant group immigrating to the United States currently. Um Right.

Speaker 14:29

And that particular group, that one is usually the one that's mostly targeted with in the news media in the past 10 or 20 years.

Speaker 1 14:37

Absolutely, yes. So they are also the links are drawn most consistently, you know, think about like MS 13 or, you know, with Hispanic groups and gangs. So that's why we wanted to include that there to kind of address those, you know, uh claims. Yeah. And so our data is is this massive conglomerate of a bunch of data sources that has led to construction of uh quite a large county-level data set that contains information on all U.S. counties from the year 2000 to 2015. We're currently working on getting data for 2020 and 2025. Uh, Dr. Feldmeyer, who I mentioned, is uh my uh co-author on this paper. This is his data set that he's you know built over the last quite a while at this point. Um, and uh, like I mentioned, we're working on getting some more new data, but a lot of I's gotta get dotted, a lot of T's gotta get crossed, and we're waiting for people to give us data. But so anyway. Um, but for this study, uh, when we think about our main dependent variable or our measure, it's uh firearm homicide specifically. And this stems from the CDC mortality data. So it's a little different, it's not uh crime data in the sense of like arrest data, but it's CDC mortality data. And these data are really cool because they provide detailed accounts of cause of death. So they allow us to examine many different forms of homicide. We could even differentiate between handgun and rifle homicide if we had wanted to. Um, but since we have this differentiation, we we, you know, the focus of the study is gun homicide. So that's what we're mainly looking at. But we do look at total homicide as well as what we call other homicide. Okay. It's essentially everything that didn't involve a firearm. Because we're here, we can look at it, we might as well. Um, but in terms of our main uh independent variables or our predictors, uh immigration and Hispanic immigration, these come from the U.S. Census Bureau, and they are percentages of the population in a county that are foreign-born or specifically Hispanic foreign-born. Um, long-standing, very common way to measure immigration at the macro level in this line of research, and allows us to see how changes in or different levels of these populations affect changes in homicide. Of course, we also have a lot of other important measures in our model, like, you know, poverty, inequality, population turnover, but I'm not gonna bore the audience with a data spiel on those measures. Um but I'm sure a few people have started to think about okay, we're talking about immigration. Were we talking about legal immigration? Are we talking about illegal immigration? And for the sake of this study, we're kind of talking about everything. We're talking about all immigration, foreign-born population in general. And there's a few right reasons why this is a choice we make, and it's also fairly common in the field. One, it it's actually really hard to get accurate measures of illegal immigration at a macro level. You know, it's not like readily available data.

Speaker 17:07

Um, nobody's raising their hand for that one.

Speaker 1 17:10

Sure. And you also kind of think theoretically, you know, if you or I are on the street, we can't look at someone and necessarily know their legal status, right? You know, that's part of it. And the other side of it as well is that there actually has been a little bit of past research that has been fortunate enough to kind of look at and isolate illegal immigration specifically. And the research shows, well, it's no different than what we kind of already seen in the broader discourse in terms of immigration effects on crime. It's that it's that inverse or null effect. Um, so that's why we're going with just total foreign-born population for this study.

Speaker 17:38

Okay, so we you're looking at the relationship between you know immigration and gun hop gun homicides, which is important because you know the people can get shot and not die. But let's focus on what we what you what you have here: gun homicides, immigration.

Speaker 1 17:52

What did you find? So uh before diving in, one thing that is important um is that we looked at these relationships in two ways. We compared places with different levels of immigration, but we also followed communities over time. So this lets us answer two different questions. First, are immigrant communities generally more or less violent? And when immigration changes in a community, there's gun violence change too. So those are our two questions.

Speaker 18:15

Sure, yeah.

Speaker 1 18:16

Yeah, and so our findings were actually very clear when comparing places with different levels of immigration. You know, findings suggested that places with larger immigrant and Hispanic immigrant populations had significantly less firearm homicide. You know, our results indicated that firearm homicide uh rate decreased by about two to three percent for every one percent increase in immigration. And and when we think about this in like a substantive way, that makes sense. You know, our findings suggest that a county where 10% of the residents are foreign-born, it would be expected to have roughly 10 to 15% lower homicide rates than an otherwise similar county that only had five percent uh foreign-born population. So it's a pretty significant finding, you know, that jump from five to ten percent of the immigrant population in a place, we're looking at five to fifty or sorry, ten to fifteen percent less firearm homicide in these places. And the same thing was found for Hispanic immigrant populations as well, suggesting, yeah, you know, the immigrant revitalization thesis, it holds up when we're looking at gun violence. Um and when we look at, you know, now when we think about our other question looking over time, when we looked at how changes in the immigration or sorry, changes in immigration over time affected uh uh changes in gun violence over time, the findings were a bit different. Um findings here suggested that growth in the immigrant population over time was largely unrelated to changes in firearm violence. Okay. And for Hispanic immigration, there may have been some indications of actually increases in firearm homicide. Um however, when we look at the body of evidence across all of our analyses, all of our models, findings are really suggesting that immigration has protective effects against firearm homicide.

Speaker 19:50

Which is you know, obviously a good thing. It fits right into the the uh thesis you have. I know absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so then uh I I was reading the article and you got into the idea of community context, which we talked about earlier, the the the new locations versus whatever the phrase was, yeah, historical. The established, yeah. Thank you. Well, um did you you looked at at that specifically as well?

Speaker 1 20:13

Yes, we did. So after we, you know, kind of have our main analysis here, we then broke it out by these destination types to see, you know, do differences emerge? What do we see? And yeah, traditional destinations did fare better off. Um, but new destinations were not necessarily worse off. They were just more null findings, meaning the immigration was more likely to be unrelated to homicide in these places or gun violence in these places. Which, you know, it coincides with the you know much of the prior literature that has looked at destination type. It's not it's not too surprising to see that, yeah, these protective effects are strongest in traditional destinations, and in new destinations, they're not as prevalent. You know, we're seeing more of a like a null finding, like I said. Um but we did actually.

Speaker 20:53

That's actually still a good thing because you're finding that the the the increase is not contributing to worse, uh worse uh crime, violent crime.

Speaker 1 21:02

Sure, sure, sure. We're still seeing even in new destinations, these places are are safer in that sense. Um and again, when we think about our overtime models, looking over time, we found pretty much the the same thing across destination, not too much of a difference. Immigration mostly unrelated. Again, that has spanic though. We do see, you know, there were a couple instances where potentially there were some increases. And and I can I can kind of touch on that a little bit more here if we'd like. Um, you know, kind of explaining why maybe we see that. Yeah. Yeah. So there are several possibilities, you know, ex possible explanations for this finding. A little speculative, but we can think about it based on theory and research, you know. One possibility is that the rapid growth in Hispanic immigrant populations during this time, because there was pretty good growth, you know, may disrupt existing social networks, thinking again back to social disorganization, or coincide with broader shifts in community conditions, such as increases in disadvantage or linguistic isolation or residential instability that are themselves associated with elevated homicide rate. You know, it's also possible that some immigrant communities may experience heightened vulnerability to gang recruitment, kind of like we talked about, social marginalization, or simply experienced increased victimization, which could contribute to higher levels of lethal violence. You know, but again, I do want to remind listeners, you know, the body of evidence from this study is really suggesting the immigrant communities experience less violence and gun homicide, you know, across all the models.

Speaker 22:20

Right. So if I heard you right, it's almost like the the the rapid expansion of the immigrant population versus what you would normally expect to occur, that might have disrupted what the normal what you normally expect to occur and therefore contribute to a little bit more social disorder, crime, those kinds of things.

Speaker 1 22:41

Yeah, because you know an important thing to remind listeners is, you know, this study, we're not we're not making inferences or or conclusions about individual people. Right. We're talking about immigration as a process here. And so yeah, immigration into certain places may have destabilized some you know areas. But again, the broader, the bigger picture is that immigrant communities really are safer in terms of gun homicide. And over time, if anything, they're more likely to be unrelated, you know, not not influencing one another.

Speaker 23:09

Okay, so from the policing perspective, whether it's the personnel, the police leaders, what are two or three implications that this study might have for them?

Speaker 1 23:18

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have a couple implications. First, you know, from a policing perspective, the takeaway is pretty straightforward. If the goal is to reduce firearm homicide, the evidence suggests agencies are better off focusing on strategies we already know work rather than treating immigration enforcement as a violence reduction strategy. You know, decades of research including this study consistently finds that immigration is not a driver of serience violence. You know, instead the strongest evidence supports approaches like focused deterrence or place-based violence reduction, problem-oriented policing, community-based intervention programs. You know, in other words, if we're trying to reduce shootings and save lives, resources are likely to have much greater impact when they're directed at people, places and behaviors that we that we know actually drive gun violence rather than immigration itself. I think back to uh Serve, uh CIR V Cincinnati Initiative to reduce violence. It was a program that took place here in Cincinnati where I'm from a couple decades ago, 15 years ago or so, um, that was specifically targeting gang violence and and shootings. And it was a combination of focused deterrence with uh you know Cincinnati police and uh community uh intervention programs to you know have social support and and that had a serious uh effect on reducing gang violence and and shootings in Cincinnati. And so it's these kind of programs that we should really you know focus on rather than immigration enforcement. And uh kind of kind of another implication you know from this as well is is it has to do with police community relationships. You know we know that crime can be underreported in some immigrant communities. Research has shown us this language barriers, uncertainty about the legal system, concerns about immigration consequences can all make people less likely to report crimes or cooperate with investigations. But at the same time, many immigrants come from countries where policing is is far more corrupt or less effective than it is in the United States. And so there is an opportunity here for law enforcement to build trust and legitimacy in these communities. And the more the agencies maybe invest in language access or community outreach or you know constant fair policing in these places, the more likely residents are to report crimes and serve as witnesses and work with investigators and it's not just a win for immigrant communities but for public safety overall.

Speaker 25:28

This is great news you did mention that if we have the time you've got something else to talk about.

Speaker 1 25:33

We've got a few we've got a few minutes so uh you know what was the other uh study you were talking about yeah sure absolutely I'm happy to share a little bit about that so kind of similar kind of different um I did a study again with uh Ben Feldmeyer uh I had another co-author on this piece uh John Laverso who's a gang scholar so uh we were uh conducting a study in Chicago looking at immigration's association with gang shootings specifically you know like I kind of mentioned it's a little bit uh you know we need more research in this area and we wanted to specifically kind of tackle this especially at a time where you know there's some information going around with you know the supposed connection between immigration and gangs like we've already talked about um and we looked at Chicago which is fairly fitting it's a long standing destination for immigrants but it's also talked about in the gang context quite often Chicago gangs are notorious and there's a long documented history of it. Anyway uh the study looked at you know we we it was really cool we got to look at uh lethal uh fatal gun violence gang related and not gang related so we could kind of see like you know are there differences does immigration affect these things differently and the findings were were were pretty interesting immigration uh was protective against non-gang shootings whether they were fatal or not so shootings that were not gang related at all immigration was uh protective against so these communities that had growth in immigration from our study took place from 2008 to 2021 so communities neighborhoods that experienced growth in their immigrant population experienced uh far less um uh uh non-gang shootings whether they were fatal or not so basically came in basically similar it's basically similar to what you found in this recent study okay very similar to what we found in this study you know different you know we're looking at neighborhoods in Chicago so a little bit smaller not counties um but what was really interesting is when we were able to isolate gang shootings um there were uh null effects for immigration i mean that they were just not related and this was at a time where both immigration and actually gang shootings were increasing in Chicago during this time um and we also looked at Mexican immigration specifically as well um kind of same reasons we talked about this time around for Hispanic um and yeah same finding that it was just not related you know there was no association between immigration and gang shootings and you know you kind of ask yourself well maybe why might that be the case and what we essentially kind of concluded was you know when you think about it while immigration you know is a revitalizing force that can reduce violence kind of like we saw in this study and like we did when we looked at non-gang shootings you know it might impact you know gang gang violence is it's unique it's different it it might be harder to impact or to change you know while immigration can help bolster friendship and kinship networks and enhance informal social control it might not have much of an effect on gang violence as it's often rooted in cycles of retaliation or collective group dynamics or status seeking and ongoing gang processes. So you know acts like drive-by shootings or drug market violence and conflicts between rival gangs that emerge from longstanding dynamics you know they might not be easily disrupted by broader community improvements that immigration might help.

Speaker 28:34

So this is this is the good thing about uh doing research and then piggybacking it on to other studies so you get the first study which is all the counties in the in the country then you got Chicago and the idea that what you're finding is contrary to what public opinion would probably be and this is why when I was first looking at this article I wasn't sure because I try to find research that directly ties into what policing is all about what they do how it relates to community hotspots you know I'm looking to talk to somebody about uh um license split readers those kinds of things so I was looking at this and the idea of immigration but I thought to myself no no we we can we we we shouldn't need to we shouldn't avoid this because of political issues we might be you know stepping on toes. I don't care and like I said I was born in this early 60s I'm old enough to not give a shit about what other people think. But the other the other point here is is that that now you have some realistic information that we can provide to the police to say hey look what you might be thinking is going on is not going on in a way that you think it is. In fact it might be beneficial for you to focus on those neighborhoods to improve your community policing approach whatever it might be. Even if it's just g getting out of the car talking to people like not it's not a hot spot, but you do the same thing in those neighborhoods we're so I thought to myself this article we have to talk about.

Speaker 1 29:55

Yeah it might not be inherently geared toward uh you know policing in that sense but there are absolutely implications that can be taken in a policing context from this especially when it comes to you know think like policies like 287G which is the cooperation between local law enforcement and federal law enforcement with you know immigration enforcement you know things of that nature there there are absolute implications here.

Speaker 30:14

Yeah so this was great again Calvin I appreciate your time uh you know I know you're working on your dissertation so taking 45 minutes to talk to me this was wonderful I really appreciate your time.

Speaker 1 30:25

No absolutely thank you for having me it was it was great to talk about this and uh I'm very excited for the opportunity and of course I want to thank my uh co-author Ben Feldmeyer as well um it was truly you know he's he's always been a great help in all of the research and work I do we work on quite a lot together but but thank you Scott I really appreciate your time well I'm I'll make sure I cut this part out of the podcast so he won't hear you have a great day all the best take care all right thanks Scott