CHICAGO, Dec. 10 (Xinhua) -- While nearly all neighborhoods in Chicago benefited from reductions in homicide, relative inequality in crime between the city's safest and most dangerous neighborhoods actually increased by 10 percent over recent years, a U.S. study showed on Monday.
The researchers at the Northwestern University (NU) thought of the "crime gap" as something similar to the education or earnings gap.
"We found out that inequality is much more complicated. While the city as a whole got 'safer,' the inequality between neighborhoods -- the crime gap -- got worse, especially in the later time period," said Andrew V. Papachristos, lead author of the study and a professor of sociology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at NU.
"This increase was driven by a greater rate of decline in the city's safest neighborhoods," said Papachristos. "This crime gap can be partly attributed to the decreasing association between concentrated disadvantage and homicide in the safest neighborhoods."
While Chicago's crime rate has declined like other cities during the "great American crime decline," Papachristos said rates in Chicago have remained higher than New York, Los Angeles and other cities.
In another NU study that was published in the American Journal of Sociology, the researchers found that the city's high crime rate is driven more by an invisible network of personal criminal connections across Chicago than by organized crime or street gangs.
The researchers found that people who commit, and are arrested for crimes together, or co-offenders, form a pathway for the spread of crime across all of the city's neighborhoods.
The study highlights the need for violence-prevention policies that provide city-level solutions, while also providing support to the most vulnerable and crime-ridden communities.
