How To Slow Down Shootings In A City Plagued By Gun Violence

Kim Bellware / The Huffington Post
January 12, 2015

In a city like Chicago, which regularly grapples with gun violence, street shootings are often referred to as “senseless” or “random”; the violence itself, “an epidemic.”

A new study published by the journal Social Science & Medicine suggests that gun violence is indeed an epidemic “transmitted” by high-risk groups, much like HIV or Ebola. But when you consider who falls victim to gun violence, the statistical data don’t seem random at all: The networks through which this violence spreads are rather small and specific. And the key to curbing the epidemic might be similar to efforts used to contain other infectious diseases.

“The majority of people who are the victims of these crimes are young men with criminal records, and people in these sorts of networks.” Andrew Papachristos, an associate professor of sociology at Yale University who co-authored the study, told The Huffington Post. “The idea that [street shootings] are truly random is overstated.”

After poring over six years worth of data on gunshot victims and arrests in Chicago, Papachristos and his co-authors put together patterns among co-offenders and their victims. Their results indicated that 70 percent of nonfatal injuries occur within networks containing just 6 percent of the city’s population. (The study did not look at gunshot victims from mass shootings or cases of domestic violence.)

“You don’t choose your genetic code or your ZIP code,” Papachristos said. “If you’re born an African-American male in Englewood, you don’t have a say. If your dad was a felon or your cousin is in a gang, you don’t have a say in that.”

The pool of people most likely to be shooting victims is a fairly concentrated one. In Chicago, victims are overwhelmingly black men between 18 and 24-years-old in low-income areas. According to Papachristos, that pool is also represented among people who engage in “high-risk” behaviors — such as owning a gun or belonging to a gang with easy access to weapons — which put them at a greater likelihood of becoming a victim.

Papachristos said even the high-profile shootings of victims like 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton and 6-month-old Jonylah Watkins — both of which seem random considering the victims’ age, sex and lack of criminal history — don’t seem as random when viewed through the lens of social network factors.