Policing Crime Guns, Not Just Gun Crime

Almost 25% of guns are used multiple times at or very close to the same place or reused within a relatively short period of time.  Just like “hot spots” for crime, guns can share similar repeat characteristics. In fact, a single firearm should be considered “durable hardware” that may never go away.

The emphasis on “gun crime” research has led to a relative lack of understanding about “crime guns” themselves.  In other words, the tools that are a part of gun crime, the guns, are rarely the subject of research.  Today we are joined by Dr. Jonathan Reid, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Dr. Reid discusses his recent publication titled, “The Gun’s Journey to Crime: Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Repeat Criminal Firearm Use” (co-authored by Yan Zhang, William King, Jennifer Clausen, and William Wells). Click play and learn more about crime guns, not just gun crime.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Welcome to the Police in Service Training Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to providing research evidence to street-level police officers and command staff aligns. 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. Ever since the Nixon administration conceptualized the war on crime, there has been a focus on violent crime, which is commonly synonymous with gun crime. In the mid-1990s, Operation Ceasefire, a problem-oriented policing approach, focused on two elements of the gun violence problem: illicit gun trafficking and gang violence, particularly in crime hotspots. Over the past 30 years, most of the research seeking to understand gun violence has studied the sociodemographic characteristics of the gun violence offenders and victims, as well as the structural and environmental factors shaping the likelihood and distribution of gun-related crime. The who and where of gun violence seems like the logical issues to study to better understand gun violence. The emphasis on gun crime research, however, has led to a relative lack of understanding about crime guns themselves. In other words, the tools that are part of gun crime, the guns, are rarely the subject of research. Today we are joined by Dr. Jonathan Reed. Dr. Reed is a criminologist and assistant professor of sociology at Texas AM University. His research examines the intersection of the life course, social inequality, violence, homicide, and community dynamics. He is also a research faculty affiliate at the University of Chicago's Justice Program. Dr. Reed is going to discuss his recent publication titled The Gun's Journey to Crime: Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Repeat Criminal Firearms Use. Thanks for joining the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Thank you for having me. Thank you, Scott.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

I'm really happy you're here. I want to get started really quick. According to the bioinformation in your background, you studied recidivism, the police view in response to opioid overdoses, which I always think is kind of interesting how they see it, immigrant crime, and a variety of other issues. What drew you to this particular topic?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Well, a cornerstone of my research agenda is violence, homicide, and community dynamics. And when studying um lethal violence and homicide in the context of America, we understand that homicide is kind of synonymous with gun crime because over the past three, four, five decades of data that we have, you know, approximately 70 to 80 percent on average of in any given year of homicides are um a gun is used in that event, right? So homicides in America are quite synonymous with gun crime itself. So I became quite interested in moving, not moving away from studying homicide. I still study homicide in those events, but to try and zone in on the weapons or the tools that are often used in these events. And as you, you know, as I gauge the literature at the time, you realize that there's not much talk or discussion in the academic realm about um crime guns themselves. So I one third of my research um is definitely about homicide and community violence, but I wanted to pinpoint and focus on some of the more micro-level um situational aspects of homicides. And so that led me to an interest in studying crime guns.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Right. I remember seeing uh recently a billboard on the side of the road somewhere just the other day I was driving, I don't recall exactly where it was, but it said that the the leading cause of death among young people is now gun violence, which is you know really kind of surprising. But let's get back to this now. So so this area of inquiry, why is this relevant to the police? I mean, do the police really care that much about the journey of a gun through time and space?

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Oh, of course. I think the police um from um beat cops to investigators up to the chief, I think all police should be interested in the nature of how crime guns are moving in time and space, right? Because while most of their investigation or their work may focus on the individual offenders, how they're moving through time and space, these offenders oftentimes are um are able to do their crimes with this tool, right? So by following the tool, we can better understand how offenders behave. And you know, oftentimes as well, um in law enforcement and also in academia, because we focus so much on the individuals involved in gun crime, we sure we we don't pay attention or we inadvertently um miss the chance to study the tools that they use, right? And what's interesting about guns, guns are durable hardware, these are durable goods. A gun can last up to a hundred years, right? So these communities are stationary um places, right? These guns are durable hardware. So despite enough, you may arrest an offender for a crime of whatever sort, but that gun that the offender may have been using may have been given to someone else. So that gun itself remains in these communities and continues to perpetuate harm. So I think for that reason, um, while we may get the offenders off the streets, if we're not it's focusing on targeting the guns themselves, the cycles may continue.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it. I've never heard of it, and it makes perfect sense, a durable good that these things do last a long time. I remember being at a conference once, and we'll get into this in a second here, but I'm just gonna jump ahead from my own remembering somebody saying that guns are often stored in locations where anybody from from uh the informal gang of the neighborhood, they all know where it is. So if one of them needs to use it, they can go and get it. So this is this is gonna be hopefully a very interesting conversation because it's good. I'm enjoying it already. Now, now you used in the research you used the term uh life course, and then you also used time in crime when discussing guns. Are these what are these concepts and are they actually different?

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, so when thinking of again focusing the the unit of analysis, or what my co-authors and I are what we're interested in is the gun as the unit of analysis. And you know, oftentimes when we study, let's say recidivism, right? Someone's desistence from crime, someone's criminal career, we we study the life course of the offender. So the the period in which that person started their criminal career to which they ended their criminal career. So when we apply that logic to guns or the life course of crime guns, we're interested in when did the criminal career of this gun begin and when did it end? And oftentimes its end is when the police has um confiscated that gun. The police has taken that gun off the streets. No, time and crime of a gun is a part of the life course of the gun, right? So the timing crime refers to the period between the gun's first known use in a criminal incident and when it was um seized by police, right? No, there's another concept called time to crime, right? So the time to crime of a gun, and that refers to when a gun was initially purchased um in retail and when it was um then seized by police after some crime or something. Now, what's interesting with the time in crime, to be to simplify it, is that some guns initially purchased illegally, but in retail, the time in crime hasn't started because that gun is not being used in any crime.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

However, potentially, um, let's say for arguments sick, that gun is stolen from a vehicle. No, it's time in crime has begun, right? Now, on another perspective, someone may go and purchase a gun at retail, right, on behalf of a family member, right? If maybe your family member is a felon, so it's a straw purchase. So they they purchase the gun for their family member. The time in crime for that gun begins at the time of purchase. Okay. Because when it's purchased, that now is um a criminal offense that the gun is being involved in, right? So we see the timing crime can be dynamic, but essentially its life course is the entire period in which um that gun, depending on its intent, if it's trafficked, is being has any criminal motive around it, right? Whereas the timing crime often involves um the period in which it is first used or first involving some criminal offense of some nature, if that makes sense. Yeah, sure. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Yeah, they they can they can cross over, but but it makes sense. Okay, now most most listeners are going to be very familiar with hotspots, and big cities and even small communities are going to have particular problems for wherever the city city is, whether it's you know uh drinking problems and or gang violence or guns. Can you tell us a bit more about the the spatial concentration of gun violence?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Oh so you know, like um there's this rule of um, yes, so spatial hotspots and crime concentration. So much like crime itself um is concentrated in space and clusters in space, um, we understand now that gun violence is the same thing, right? So the vast majority of gun assaults in any major city in the US occurs in these hotspots, right? So, for example, past studies have shown that in places like Minneapolis, about 10% of street segments accounted for 65% of shootings in that city. Um in places like Milwaukee and um Detroit, in St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, about 15% of black groups account for over half of lethal and non-lethal shootings. And recently there was a study that came out um trying to understand the upsurge in gun violence during COVID, and it found that in cities such as New York, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, 50% or more of gun assaults took place in only 10% of black groups. Right? So essentially, just like the hotspots of crime, gun assaults, the vast majority of them are occurring in a very small um number of places and street segments.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Okay, so now we're gonna move on to a bit more of your lit review before we get into your study. The the literature review, which I always read these because I find the idea of uh, you know, going looking back in time, what others have done and what we're gonna do now, or what you do, interesting. I just like those kinds of ideas. Now, your literature lit review offered some interesting background on gun crimes. What can you tell us about those things?

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Right. So piggybacking off what we just said about um the spatial concentration of gun violence. Now, one phenomenon that can help us to understand the spatial concentration of gun violence is this phenomenon called near repeat gun assaults, right? And essentially, this is where um assaults um when a location that had a gun assault is significantly more likely to have another gun assault very quickly, right? So in let's just say a convenience store has, or outside of a convenience store gas station, there's a gun assault. Research suggests that within a week, the probability of another gun assault happening in or around that location is very high, right? So one way to explain this hot spots of gun assaults is this near-repeat phenomena. And a part of the near-repeat phenomena is that there's certain places that we call crime attractors, right? Like um liquor stores, nightclubs, right? Places where people are drinking alcohol, places where um there's a lot of interaction between people and a lot of um potential victims um of crime, you know, and motivated offenders and potentially a lack of guardianship. So these types of places often attract um these types of crime, right? So um, you know, routine activities theory argues that these places are more likely to be um assaulted again. Now, beyond um the places themselves, the actual built environments, there's also um arguments that a lot of the concentration of gun violence in different locations has to also do with certain subcultural mechanisms, right, of the area, right? Where in certain settings there is what researchers call it this code of the street, right? And in the code of the street arguments, um, persons have like there's certain values that um focus on honor, focus on respect, right? And if someone is, let's say, assaulted, you have to show grit by defending yourself. And oftentimes in defending yourself and not like you know in defending yourself, you may a gun may come into play, right? And let's say someone is killed. The killing of that person may lead to, again, that code is still there, retaliation, right? So this starts this cycle of violence of retaliatory violence that oftentimes, because of guns being involved, leads to homicides and retaliatory violence.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Yeah, the uh I was doing some work with Buffalo when uh when when I was still teaching, and they were telling me about when they're doing investigations, that very often the the the victims would say, I I don't remember anything, I didn't see anything, and don't or some variation of don't worry, I'll take care of this myself. And I imagine that's been around for a while, but just it's that that notion, but the idea of it being just voiced to the officers was different than than years ago when I was doing the job, which was again many, many years ago, they never said those kinds of things, but it's it's a different animal now. They're actually willing to admit to the fact that I'll take care of it, this will be all right. And very often they did.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

No, of course, of course. And I think even um, you know, we we have this victim offender overlap at times, right? So oftentimes some of the victims may not maybe to some regard involved in crime themselves, right? So going to the police for reprieve may not be on the table, right? Going to the police to say that you maybe you were robbed of drugs is not a smart idea. So they have to take this same um justice into their own hands, so to speak. So they become the self-help mechanism of um adjudicating the situation themselves. That leads to that retaliatory violence that we've talked about.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Right. Okay, now let's get into your study. Now, what were the basic questions in how did you do the study? In other words, where'd you get your data, those kinds of things?

SPEAKER_00 15:51

So essentially, our study, we are interested in again, we we speak of this notion that guns are durable hardware, right? So oftentimes you may take an offender off the street, but if the gun doesn't go off the street as well, that gun is going to be there and cause harm, continue causing harm, right? So where we were focused on trying to map out and understand how guns, the movement of crime guns in Houston, Texas. And so one of our research questions was we're interested in how far do repeat use firearms travel between crime incidents. So after the first incident and the second, for example, what is the distance between those incidents? Another question we were interested in is how fast are crime guns used again? So after the initial incident, how long does it take for them to be used again? Then, broadly speaking, we're interested in the different factors, whether whether it be contextual or situational factors that were involved in the distance guns traveled before they were used again or the time that elapsed. Now we use Naibin data, um, again, focusing on the city of Houston. And this Naibin data, what was unique about it is that it's probably the only Naibian data to this point that has addresses of the location of different incidents, right? We had over a decade, about 12 years of data. So we were able to geocode the data, right? So map each incident to a specific latitude and longitude coordinate, so a specific address in order to um answer these questions, along with the incident reports, so we know the time and the date of each incident, right? So that's essentially what we did. We've also focused on, we had some guns in our sample that were used 16, 20 different times, right? No, we focused on what we call diads and triads. So we focused on guns that were used at minimum twice, right? They were repeatedly used, and we went up to three times. Um because of certain certain statistical analysis and certain limitations, we weren't able to analyze the guns that were used over 10 times or so. However, in a follow-up study, we are going to use social network analysis and different types of methods to explore those types of guns. But essentially, 12 years of data, of Naibin data in Houston to answer these questions.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Okay, that's great. This is the beauty of the modern technology that everybody has these days. Now, NIBAN's most police officers are going to be aware of what that is, so we don't have to explain that, but the and the ability then to geocode it. And I I I suspect the beauty of using data from Houston is that for better or worse, the city has a large number of gun crimes. The city's also enormous, so you can track the travel rather than just a small jurisdiction. In fact, once you leave the city, you've there's a whole lot of nothing out there. Anyway, so what what did what did you find as far as you know, the okay, it's used once, then it's used a second time, maybe a third time. What did you find as far as its travel and what was the second question? Or how soon it was used again.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

And how soon it was used again. You know, before I say those findings, an important finding is nine 98% of the guns that we um analyzed did not leave the city.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Really?

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Did not leave the city of Houston, right? Which is a very interesting finding. And our data we we searched in we searched um Nibin low um databases in um New Orleans, in um Louisiana, in different places, and we find that 98% of the guns, the crime guns, did not leave. So that was a very interesting result, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

And did it well that that in and of itself is fascinating. That you know, once they're used, they stick around.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

They stick around, yes. Once they're used, they're sticking around. And you know, oftentimes when we think of maybe gun trafficking, right? We you know, we think that, well, someone, these crime guns are are are leaving the cities. Well, in our data shows that they're not, right? The vast majority are in the city and they're traveling between neighborhoods and between communities and within neighborhoods and communities. So what we found is that in terms of time, for example, time in terms of travel or in terms of distance, we found that about 5% of our sample traveled less than 0.1 miles, like feet. We had we had incidents that different incidents where the gun was used in the exact same location, right? And this goes to what we spoke about earlier, the near-repeat phenomena where a victimized location will be victimized again.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Yeah, that's that's not a safe place to be.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

That's not a safe place to be. So we so we did find, and we had um over about almost 1200 matchy cases, um, and almost 450 different guns. So about 5% of those were used literally in the same location, okay, which is fascinating, right? About 20% were used um within less than a mile of each other. So from one instant to the next was less than a mile. About over 50% um were used within less than five miles, and 97% of the cases that we um um examined were used within less than 20 miles. So as we said earlier, the vast majority all were used within the city limits, reused within city limits. And a majority of guns also were used within five miles of each other, right? So an incident here, and then on average, about five miles away, it was used again. Right. So that is in itself quite interesting.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Right. And the other thing about Houston is because it's so big, and I'm familiar with it, that you could go to a neighborhood in Houston. And five miles is not that far.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

It's not very far at all.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Where I live, I used to live in Niagara Falls. Five miles will get you from Niagara Falls to you know not Niagara Falls anymore. Not even in the city. So wow. Okay. Exactly. Exactly. Keep going.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

No, exactly. Five miles. And you know, we did have one gun. We had one weapon that was used like was outside of the city limits, was one of one of the guns, and it was used 50 miles away. But that's an outlier, right? The vast majority, um, and even the fact that a quarter of the weapons were used within a mile and a half, that's that's that is a lot of damage there. Now, in terms of timing of all of this stuff, you know, we had about four and a half, about almost five percent of our sample. Um, this the same gun was used within this on the same day, right? So in different incidents, in isolated incidents from each other, it was used in the same day. Right. So the same gun was used in the same day, right? Um, about a quarter of our sample or so, a bit less than a quarter of our sample, the gun was used within less than a week, seven days. Within less than seven days, it was reused.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Um I I'm gonna I'm gonna cut in for a second. I'm gonna say kind of like the location, you know, five percent were used within feet, and twenty percent were used within like a you know very short distance, and these guns used the same day or within a week. This is not meant to be funny, those are hot guns.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Very hot, very hot guns.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Okay, I'm sorry, can you keep going?

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Yeah, very, very hot guns. And you know, one could argue if so our data focuses focuses on the gun, but we don't know if it's the same individuals using the gun. Right. Right? So it's a very hot gun that could potentially be it's maybe the same person, or it could be different people using the same gun in the same day. So that in itself is also interesting to understand the movement of these guns, right? Um, but unfortunately, we don't have data on the individuals using the guns, but we do know where the guns are being used, right? So um with the timing of it all, yeah, about 5% used in the same day, over a quarter used within a week, and just about a half of the weapons were used within eight weeks or two months, right? So half of the guns that we had were used within two months of their initial incident. And then we had some outliers. Um, we had um about 83% of all the weapons in our sample were reused within a year of their initial use. So that's that's that. And then, you know, broadly speaking, we find that um guns that are used fastest are often used. Um guns travel shorter distances um when they're used um in more densely populated areas, and they also are used quickly in densely populated areas, and also when the initial offense was robbery. So it seems that, and that makes sense. So it seems that um persons who are involved in in robbery or guns that are involved in robbery um are reused very quickly, oftentimes in another robbery, but also interestingly, they're used guns used in robberies, are often used further away. The incidents are further away from each other, which makes sense. Maybe you rob, you engage in a robbery at point A and you want to engage in another robbery, so you go a bit further away to engage in that robbery. So overall, that's what the the data sets.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

But but since you're gonna need a Nibans connection, which is probably gonna be a shell casing, that means the robbery, a shot was fired. Am I correct? Shot was fired. That's a reasonable assumption. Yeah, a shot was fired. So these are not just you know, you know, you know, give me all the money and then you run away and leave. If somebody's popping off around, okay. So we we've got about seven or eight minutes left. What are two or three implications for the police practice in police leadership?

SPEAKER_00 26:04

So one implication, um uh a very important one, is really for the leaders and investigators, right? So research suggests that um information from NIBEN hits or leads um provided in a timely manner, um, are very valuable for investigations, right? So the quicker we can get um NIBIN hits or leads, right? So is the quicker we can help investigators track down suspects and so on. And the research suggests that this is especially important as it relates to robberies and homicides. So the faster we can get investigators, information from NIBIN, the faster we can solve robberies and homicides. Now, from a practical perspective, especially when it relates to NIBIN technicians, you know, so forensics comes out, law enforcement secures the scene, makes sure everything is okay, forensics gets that. A practical implication is NIBIN technicians, instead of searching like the entire NIBIN database to try to find a lead or a match, they should filter these searches based on the time and distance of the event, right? So if you put in a new um input into NIBIN, filter and you're looking for a lead or a hit, filter by let's say, all right, the incident happened on Monday, I'm gonna filter by time. So I'm gonna filter for the past two weeks, cases input in the past two weeks, and cases input are less than a mile away, a mile radius, right? And by doing that, it speeds up the chances of finding a lead and gets these hits done faster. So the quicker we can find that, oh, this same gun using this homicide today was used in a robbery last week, the quicker we can help um investigators. So I think practically practical implications are it speeds up investigations, it speeds up the fact that we can get these, connect the same gun to different crimes, and by virtue it speeds up investigations to apprehend suspects.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Okay, so a lot of information from this podcast. This was been good. Is is there anything that we missed that you want to mention? You're not on you're not on the spot, not by any stretch of the imagination, because like I said, these the the the fact that there's a these are hot guns, and I don't again you you can use that as it in any way you want. I mean but they're being used frequently in these locations.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

This is much I I'm I'm betting that most officers are gonna hear that and say, I kind of thought that, but now we've got empirical evidence that yeah, these these and and whoever you whoever whoever is using it, you know, like you say, we can't connect the gun with a person necessarily. But maybe you can connect the gun with people. So that person's connected with three or four other you know, you the analysts can do a social network analysis of who they who they hang out with and their family members and their friends, whether it's a formal gang recognized by the FBI or it's an informal, I think they're calling them groups. They're not calling informal groups, yes. But this this information, I I think is really gonna be helpful.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Yes, and I I think I think one uh other finding that was important, um, is important to you know, we we we started off talking about the durability of guns, right? Um, from our sample, about 54% um of the guns in our sample were actually seized by police, right? And what that helped us to do was to calculate the time in crime of those guns, right? So of the 432 unique weapons, which comprised that 54%, we found that the time in crime, so from it, the time from initial known use in a crime to when police seized it, was about 276 days, right? So that's one could argue a relatively long time in crime. That's a long time. So these guns from their initial use are circulating for almost a year, you know, based on our data before police are seizing them. And as we have said, that because they've been used so quickly and in short distances, in that time span, a lot of harm is potentially being done. So I think if if we can lessen the time and crime of guns from almost a year to much shorter periods, this can also help um the the potential harm being caused by these weapons.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Right. And you also just, as you say, you looked at okay, the initial use, the secondary use, and the third use, and that was it, that was as far as you went. So there could have been more after that. Dr. Reed, Jonathan, this has been great. I I really appreciate your time having this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Thank you so much, and I appreciate your time. I hope this is helpful, and I hope this can help with some problem analysis and different types of things and help law enforcement to get that job done.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

That's the goal. You have a great day. Okay, thank you. All the best.

unknown 30:55

Bye.