A V Papachristos
Biographic Data
| ID | 69970 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A V Papachristos |
| GIVEN NAMES | A V |
| FAMILY NAME | Papachristos |
| SIGNATURE | PAPACHRISTOS A V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0975-8320 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1332 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Gun Violence Exposure and the Perceived Need to Carry a Firearm
Gun violence exposure (GVE) is associated with adverse mental health outcomes and firearm carrying. The extent to which community-led programs aimed at reducing violence counteract these effects is unknown. This study sought to examine (1) the relationships between GVE, anticipated risk of assault, psychological distress, and the perceived need to carry a firearm for protection and (2) whether awareness of community violence intervention (CVI) ef…
Navigating Opioid Overdose Risks in an Administrative Proxy Network
This study uses mixed methods social network analysis (MMSNA) to examine the concentration of opioid overdoses among highly vulnerable people embedded in an administrative proxy network in an overdose hot spot. Descriptive network analyses are used to understand the contours of individual and relational overdose risk in an administrative proxy network of people who use and sell opioids. Interviews with market participants are then used to underst…
Don’t Go
Andrew V. Papachristos on the daily practice of segregtion
Characterizing Violence Intervention Street Outreach Participants and Service Dosage
Community violence intervention street outreach (CVI-SO) strategies are growing in popularity as non-punitive approaches to solving the public health problem of community gun violence. Evidence on the effectiveness of CVI-SO on rates of violence is mixed and faces challenges due to concerns with documentation and data privacy, intentional selection bias in program design, and variation in participant risk and needs. Effective evaluation requires …
A Relational Approach to Street Gangs
The gang world is built not through individual actions alone, but by larger constellations of relationships and social networks between and within groups, their members and associates, and the relationship between gangs and their social environs. This chapter advances a relational understanding of gangs and gang behaviors that extends the group process perspective by more deeply tying gang research to relational thinking and social network theory…
Re-Centering the Community in Violence Intervention
Cities across the country have increasingly turned toward community violence interventions (CVI) to address community safety without relying on criminal legal strategies. This article inspects beneath the veneer of present-day CVI approaches to examine how their work is dedicated as much to neighborhood social organization as it is to responding to gun violence. Underneath contemporary definitions of outreach workers as mediators of violence, ear…
Threats to Blue Networks
Police culture creates an "us versus them" dynamic, which, at its worst, treats threats to the "thin blue line" as worthy of group response. Prior research documents such a group threat process as a possible mechanism for police misconduct, but few studies have analyzed the precise network relationships that serve as the conduit for a misconduct response. Using data on misconduct, officer injuries, and officer networks within the Chicago Police D…
The importance of neighborhood offending networks for gun violence and firearm availability
The salience of neighborhoods in shaping crime patterns is one of sociology's most robust areas of research. One way through which neighborhoods shape outcomes is through the creation and maintenance of social networks, patterns of interactions and relationships among neighborhood residents, organizations, groups, and institutions. This paper explores the relationship between network structures generated through acts of co-offending-when two or m…
“We know what's going on in our community”
Communities of color are disproportionately impacted by gun violence. Unlocking potential community-led solutions could be the key to quelling the gun violence epidemic and its impact on these communities. In this qualitative study, we explored community perspectives on local assets that may prevent and mitigate gun violence. We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews (n = 45) among individuals not directly involved in gun violence (i.e., …
The Corner, the Crew, and the Digital Street
Social media is increasingly intertwined into people's lives, spurring questions about the relationships between online behavior and offline actions. We advance knowledge in conflict dynamics by using a multiplex network framework that conceptualizes online and offline gang relationships as co-constitutive networks-online and offline relationships often overlap and entangle in complex ways that influence behavior in both the virtual and real worl…
The promises and perils of crime prediction
Violence brokers and super-spreaders
The rise of organised crime changed Chicago violence structurally by creating networks of rivalries and conflicts wherein violence ricocheted. This study examines the organised crime violence network during Prohibition by analysing ‘violence brokers’ – individuals who committed multiple violence acts that linked separate violent events into a connected violence network. We analyse the two-mode violence network from the Capone Database, a relation…
Bad apples and incredible certitude
Contrary to CK's conclusions, their preferred estimates of the effect of incapacitating "bad apples" on misconduct are squarely within the range of other interventions aimed at reducing police complaints and use of force. Once network spillovers are accounted for, estimates are up to five times as large. We conclude with a discussion of how even small reductions in misconduct can have outsized benefits as measured in both dollars and human suffer…
Procedural justice training reduces police use of force and complaints against officers
Existing research shows that distrust of the police is widespread and consequential for public safety. However, there is a shortage of interventions that demonstrably reduce negative police interactions with the communities they serve. A training program in Chicago attempted to encourage 8,480 officers to adopt procedural justice policing strategies. These strategies emphasize respect, neutrality, and transparency in the exercise of authority, wh…
Rules of the Game
Gang members frequently refer to street life as a “game” (or “The Game”): a social milieu in which status is lost or won by the way individuals and groups manage their reputations. Like other games, successfully participating in the street game may demand adherence to certain rules, such as the willingness to violently redress threats, the avoidance of “weak” behaviors, and the protection of one’s allies. This paper draws on detailed police recor…
Network Position and Police Who Shoot
This study applies the growing field of network science to explore whether police violence is associated with characteristics of an officer's social networks and his or her placement within those networks. To do this, we re-create the network of police misconduct for the Chicago Police Department using more than 38,442 complaints filed against police officers between 2000 and 2003. Our statistical models reveal that officers who shoot at civilian…
The influence of firearms trafficking on gunshot injuries in a co-offending network
Evidence of the Effect of Police Violence on Citizen Crime Reporting
Hot spots policing of small geographic areas effects on crime
Network exposure and excessive use of force
Research Summary In this study, we investigate how a police officer's exposure to peers accused of misconduct shapes his or her involvement in excessive use of force. By drawing from 8,642 Chicago police officers named in multiple complaints, we reconstruct police misconduct ego‐networks using complaint records. Our results show that officer involvement in excessive use of force complaints is predicted by having a greater proportion of co‐accused…
Reducing gunshot victimization in high-risk social networks through direct and spillover effects
The Network Structure of Police Misconduct
Conventional explanations of police misconduct generally adopt a microlevel focus on deviant officers or a macrolevel focus on the top-down organization of police departments. Between these levels are social networks of misconduct. This study recreates these networks using data on 16,503 complaints and 15,811 police officers over a six-year period in Chicago. We examine individual-level factors associated with receiving a complaint, the basic pro…
Understanding the Crime Gap
The United States has experienced an unprecedented decline in violent crime over the last two decades. Throughout this decline, however, violent crime continued to concentrate in socially and economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Using detailed homicide records from 1990 to 2010, this study examines the spatial patterning of violent crime in Chicago to determine whether or not all neighborhoods experienced decreases in violence. We find…
Closer to Guns
Connected in Crime
The unequal spatial distribution of crime is an enduring feature of cities. While research suggests that spatial diffusion processes heighten this concentration, the actual mechanisms of diffusion are not well understood as research rarely measures the ways in which people, groups, and behaviors connect neighborhoods. This study considers how a particular behavior, criminal co-offending, creates direct and indirect pathways between neighborhoods.…
Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence of Neighborhood Violence
Sociologists have given considerable attention to identifying the neighborhood-level social-interactional mechanisms that influence outcomes such as crime, educational attainment, and health. Yet, cultural mechanisms are often overlooked in quantitative studies of neighborhood effects. This paper adds a cultural dimension to neighborhood effects research by exploring the consequences of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism refers to a cultural frame in…
Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community
High-profile cases of police violence-disproportionately experienced by black men-may present a serious threat to public safety if they lower citizen crime reporting. Using an interrupted time series design, this study analyzes how one of Milwaukee's most publicized cases of police violence against an unarmed black man, the beating of Frank Jude, affected police-related 911 calls. Controlling for crime, prior call patterns, and several neighborho…
The Corner and the Crew
Nearly a century of empirical research examines how neighborhood properties influence a host of phenomena such as crime, poverty, health, civic engagement, immigration, and economic inequality. Theoretically bundled within these neighborhood effects are institutions' and actors' social networks that are the foundation of other neighborhood-level processes such as social control, mobilization, and cultural assimilation. Yet, despite such long-stan…
Murder by Structure
Most sociological theories consider murder an outcome of the differential distribution of individual, neighborhood, or social characteristics. And while such studies explain variation in aggregate homicide rates, they do not explain the social order of murder, that is, who kills whom, when, where, and for what reason. This article argues that gang murder is best understood not by searching for its individual determinants but by examining the soci…
More Coffee, Less Crime? The Relationship between Gentrification and Neighborhood Crime Rates in Chicago, 1991 to 2005
This study examines the relationship between gentrification and neighborhood crime rates by measuring the growth and geographic spread of one of gentrification's most prominent symbols: coffee shops. The annual counts of neighborhood coffee shops provide an on–the–ground measure of a particular form of economic development and changing consumption patterns that tap into central theoretical frames within the gentrification literature. Our analysis…
Tragic, but not random
Social Networks and the Risk of Gunshot Injury
The Effect of Local Violence on Children’s Attention and Impulse Control
Objectives. We examined whether the burden of violence in a child’s community environment alters the child’s behavior and functioning in the classroom setting. Methods. To identify the effects of local violence, we exploited variation in the timing of local homicides, based on data from the Chicago Police Department, relative to the timing of interview assessments conducted as part of a randomized controlled trial conducted with preschoolers in H…
The Company You Keep? The Spillover Effects of Gang Membership on Individual Gunshot Victimization in a Co‐offending Network
The effects of gang membership on individual social, behavior, cognitive, and health outcomes are well documented. Yet, research consistently has shown that gang membership and the boundaries of gangs are often fluid and amorphous. The current study examines how social proximity to a gang member in one's co‐offending network influences the probability of being a gunshot victim. We re‐create and analyze the social network of all individuals who we…
Trust Thy Crooked Neighbor
Bureaucratic and patrimonial theories of organized crime tend to miss the history and mobility of crime groups integrating into and organizing with legitimate society. The network property of multiplexity-when more than one type of relationship exists between a pair of actors-offers a theoretical and empirical inroad to analyzing overlapping relationships of seemingly disparate social spheres. Using the historical case of organized crime in Chica…
The Paradox of Law Enforcement in Immigrant Communities
Frustrated by federal inaction on immigration reform, several U.S. states in recent years have proposed or enacted laws designed to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States and to facilitate their removal. An underappreciated implication of these laws is the potential alienation of immigrant communities-even law-abiding, cooperative individuals-from the criminal justice system. The ability of the criminal justice system to detec…
Promises and pitfalls of data sharing in qualitative research
Changing the Street Dynamic
Research Summary This study uses a quasi‐experimental design to evaluate the efficacy of Chicago's Group Violence Reduction Strategy (VRS), a gun violence reduction program that delivers a focused‐deterrence and legitimacy‐based message to gang factions through a series of hour‐long “call‐ins.” The results suggest that those gang factions who attend a VRS call‐in experience a 23% reduction in overall shooting behavior and a 32% reduction in gunsh…
Who You Claim
Network exposure and excessive use of force
Research Summary In this study, we investigate how a police officer's exposure to peers accused of misconduct shapes his or her involvement in excessive use of force. By drawing from 8,642 Chicago police officers named in multiple complaints, we reconstruct police misconduct ego‐networks using complaint records. Our results show that officer involvement in excessive use of force complaints is predicted by having a greater proportion of co‐accused…
The Network Structure of Police Misconduct
Conventional explanations of police misconduct generally adopt a microlevel focus on deviant officers or a macrolevel focus on the top-down organization of police departments. Between these levels are social networks of misconduct. This study recreates these networks using data on 16,503 complaints and 15,811 police officers over a six-year period in Chicago. We examine individual-level factors associated with receiving a complaint, the basic pro…
Connected in Crime
The unequal spatial distribution of crime is an enduring feature of cities. While research suggests that spatial diffusion processes heighten this concentration, the actual mechanisms of diffusion are not well understood as research rarely measures the ways in which people, groups, and behaviors connect neighborhoods. This study considers how a particular behavior, criminal co-offending, creates direct and indirect pathways between neighborhoods.…
Network Exposure and Homicide Victimization in an African American Community
Objectives. We estimated the association of an individual’s exposure to homicide in a social network and the risk of individual homicide victimization across a high-crime African American community. Methods. Combining 5 years of homicide and police records, we analyzed a network of 3718 high-risk individuals that was created by instances of co-offending. We used logistic regression to model the odds of being a gunshot homicide victim by individua…
Evidence of the Effect of Police Violence on Citizen Crime Reporting
From social networks to health
Too big to fail
Understanding the Crime Gap
The United States has experienced an unprecedented decline in violent crime over the last two decades. Throughout this decline, however, violent crime continued to concentrate in socially and economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Using detailed homicide records from 1990 to 2010, this study examines the spatial patterning of violent crime in Chicago to determine whether or not all neighborhoods experienced decreases in violence. We find…
Closer to Guns
The Corner, the Crew, and the Digital Street
Social media is increasingly intertwined into people's lives, spurring questions about the relationships between online behavior and offline actions. We advance knowledge in conflict dynamics by using a multiplex network framework that conceptualizes online and offline gang relationships as co-constitutive networks-online and offline relationships often overlap and entangle in complex ways that influence behavior in both the virtual and real worl…
The Network Structure of Crime
From theoretical physics to field‐driven anthropology, researchers are increasingly exploring how the connections among individuals, amoebas, brain cells, organizations, and institutions affect what we feel, think, and do. However, the application of social network analysis to the study of crime, deviance, and violence has arrived a bit late to this network turn in the social and behavioral science. I argue that this network turn in the social sc…
Interpreting Inkblots
The Concentration and Stability of Gun Violence at Micro Places in Boston, 1980–2008
Murder by Structure
Most sociological theories consider murder an outcome of the differential distribution of individual, neighborhood, or social characteristics. And while such studies explain variation in aggregate homicide rates, they do not explain the social order of murder, that is, who kills whom, when, where, and for what reason. This article argues that gang murder is best understood not by searching for its individual determinants but by examining the soci…
The Relevance of Micro Places to Citywide Robbery Trends
Robbery, and the fear it inspires, has a profound effect on the quality of life in certain urban neighborhoods. Recent advances in criminological research suggest that there is significant clustering of crime in micro places, or ‘‘hot spots,’’ that generate a disproportionate amount of criminal events in a city. In this article, the authors use growth curve regression models to uncover distinctive developmental trends in robbery incidents at stre…
Too big to fail
More Coffee, Less Crime? The Relationship between Gentrification and Neighborhood Crime Rates in Chicago, 1991 to 2005
This study examines the relationship between gentrification and neighborhood crime rates by measuring the growth and geographic spread of one of gentrification's most prominent symbols: coffee shops. The annual counts of neighborhood coffee shops provide an on–the–ground measure of a particular form of economic development and changing consumption patterns that tap into central theoretical frames within the gentrification literature. Our analysis…
Who You Claim
Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence of Neighborhood Violence
Sociologists have given considerable attention to identifying the neighborhood-level social-interactional mechanisms that influence outcomes such as crime, educational attainment, and health. Yet, cultural mechanisms are often overlooked in quantitative studies of neighborhood effects. This paper adds a cultural dimension to neighborhood effects research by exploring the consequences of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism refers to a cultural frame in…
The Chicago School of Sociology
The Effects of Hot Spots Policing on Crime
In recent years, crime scholars and practitioners have pointed to the potential benefits of focusing police crime prevention efforts on crime places. Research suggests that there is significant clustering of crime in small places or “hot spots.” A number of researchers have argued that crime problems can be reduced more efficiently if police officers focused their attention to these deviant places. In this article, we update and improve upon a pr…
Social Networks and the Risk of Gunshot Injury
The Effect of Local Violence on Children’s Attention and Impulse Control
Objectives. We examined whether the burden of violence in a child’s community environment alters the child’s behavior and functioning in the classroom setting. Methods. To identify the effects of local violence, we exploited variation in the timing of local homicides, based on data from the Chicago Police Department, relative to the timing of interview assessments conducted as part of a randomized controlled trial conducted with preschoolers in H…
The Paradox of Law Enforcement in Immigrant Communities
Frustrated by federal inaction on immigration reform, several U.S. states in recent years have proposed or enacted laws designed to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States and to facilitate their removal. An underappreciated implication of these laws is the potential alienation of immigrant communities-even law-abiding, cooperative individuals-from the criminal justice system. The ability of the criminal justice system to detec…
The Importance of Cohesion for Gang Research, Policy, and Practice
The Corner and the Crew
Nearly a century of empirical research examines how neighborhood properties influence a host of phenomena such as crime, poverty, health, civic engagement, immigration, and economic inequality. Theoretically bundled within these neighborhood effects are institutions' and actors' social networks that are the foundation of other neighborhood-level processes such as social control, mobilization, and cultural assimilation. Yet, despite such long-stan…
The Network Structure of Crime
From theoretical physics to field‐driven anthropology, researchers are increasingly exploring how the connections among individuals, amoebas, brain cells, organizations, and institutions affect what we feel, think, and do. However, the application of social network analysis to the study of crime, deviance, and violence has arrived a bit late to this network turn in the social and behavioral science. I argue that this network turn in the social sc…
Network Exposure and Homicide Victimization in an African American Community
Objectives. We estimated the association of an individual’s exposure to homicide in a social network and the risk of individual homicide victimization across a high-crime African American community. Methods. Combining 5 years of homicide and police records, we analyzed a network of 3718 high-risk individuals that was created by instances of co-offending. We used logistic regression to model the odds of being a gunshot homicide victim by individua…
Crime
Changing the Street Dynamic
Research Summary This study uses a quasi‐experimental design to evaluate the efficacy of Chicago's Group Violence Reduction Strategy (VRS), a gun violence reduction program that delivers a focused‐deterrence and legitimacy‐based message to gang factions through a series of hour‐long “call‐ins.” The results suggest that those gang factions who attend a VRS call‐in experience a 23% reduction in overall shooting behavior and a 32% reduction in gunsh…
The Company You Keep? The Spillover Effects of Gang Membership on Individual Gunshot Victimization in a Co‐offending Network
The effects of gang membership on individual social, behavior, cognitive, and health outcomes are well documented. Yet, research consistently has shown that gang membership and the boundaries of gangs are often fluid and amorphous. The current study examines how social proximity to a gang member in one's co‐offending network influences the probability of being a gunshot victim. We re‐create and analyze the social network of all individuals who we…
Tragic, but not random
From social networks to health
Promises and pitfalls of data sharing in qualitative research
Trust Thy Crooked Neighbor
Bureaucratic and patrimonial theories of organized crime tend to miss the history and mobility of crime groups integrating into and organizing with legitimate society. The network property of multiplexity-when more than one type of relationship exists between a pair of actors-offers a theoretical and empirical inroad to analyzing overlapping relationships of seemingly disparate social spheres. Using the historical case of organized crime in Chica…
Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community
High-profile cases of police violence-disproportionately experienced by black men-may present a serious threat to public safety if they lower citizen crime reporting. Using an interrupted time series design, this study analyzes how one of Milwaukee's most publicized cases of police violence against an unarmed black man, the beating of Frank Jude, affected police-related 911 calls. Controlling for crime, prior call patterns, and several neighborho…
Crime Patterns and Interventions (41 works) · Criminology (36 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Political science (25 works) · Poison control (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Medicine (19 works) · Gun Ownership and Violence Research (16 works)