Matthew Valasik
Biographic Data
| ID | 288149 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Valasik |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Valasik |
| SIGNATURE | VALASIK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Louisiana State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1909-2008 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The (non)offensive nature of “white power” music, a research note
The mainstreaming of extremist white supremacy's racist rhetoric over the last decade has facilitated the growth of far‐right violence in the United States. Music provides a vital tool in helping spread and integrate racist norms and values into the larger mainstream music ecosystem. White power music, from its inception, has been geared toward younger generations as a recruitment and messaging tool. This study examines the offensive nature of wh…
“Somebody’s Watching Me”: Surveying Police Surveillance of Gangs
Tension remains between how gangs are policed by law enforcement and whether such practices are overtly invading the privacy of citizens or infringing their Fourth Amendment rights. Such concerns have risen in the era of big data and predictive analytics. This chapter discusses the policing of gangs, both conventionally and through data-driven approaches. As the implementation and use of data-driven policing across the 18,000 police jurisdictions…
Gang Ecological Diversity in the Hollenbeck Area of Los Angeles, 1978–2012
Criminal street gangs are paradoxically both ephemeral and durable social forms. Unique gangs might emerge to only disappear a short while later, while others may persist for decades. These dynamics raise questions about the ecological diversity of gangs over time and space. This chapter examines gang diversity in an area of Los Angeles over a 35-year period. It looks to annual counts of the number of uniquely named gang cliques identified in gan…
Gang injunction, What's your function? Investigating the relationship between civil gang injunctions and gang associates' patterns of association
Population growth and its paradox: An investigation into the correlates of four forms of violence in a rapidly expanding suburb
Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream
The continued public presence of far‐right groups, particularly alt‐right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys) participating in mass demonstrations and protests across the United States has made it clear that these groups and their behavior remain a concern. The overall lack of knowledge among policy makers, law enforcement, and community residents on how to deal with alt‐right gang members has limited their ability to intervene and prevent violence. The mis…
Territory, residency, and routine activities: A typology of gang member mobility patterns with implications for place-based interventions
Rivalries, reputation, retaliation, and repetition: Testing plausible mechanisms for the contagion of violence between street gangs using relational event models
The hypothesis that violence—especially gang violence—behaves like a contagious disease has grown in popularity in recent years. Scholars have long observed the tendency for violence to cluster in time and space, but little research has focused on empirically unpacking the mechanisms that make violence contagious. In the context of gang violence, retaliation is the prototypical mechanism to explain why violence begets violence. In this study, we …
Civilizing Space or Criminalizing Place: Using Routine Activities Theory to Better Understand How Legal Hybridity Spatially Regulates “Deviant Populations
Classifying Far-Right Groups as Gangs
The uneven response by law enforcement has resulted in the overall under-policing of far-right groups. Policy makers and the broader criminal justice system need consider proactive approaches if the goal is to prevent violence from far-right groups. A straightforward and appropriate approach is to treat far-right groups as street gangs. Existing gang statutes are a proven tool is aggressively used on BIPOC gangs and should be equally applied to f…
The Alt-Right Movement and National Security
Identifying the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol as an inflection point, this article analyzes the historical relationship between White supremacy and the US military from Reconstruction after the Civil War to the present. The article posits causes for the disproportionate number of current and former members of the military associated with White power groups and proposes steps the Department of Defense can take to combat the problems pos…
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same”: Research on Gang-Related Violence in the 21st Century—Introduction to Special Issue
The goal of this Special Issue is to examine the diverse nature of gang-related violence in modern life by providing insights into the growing complexities to better direct public policy solutions in the 21st Century [...]
East Side Story: Disaggregating Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles
This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted…
Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White
Painting a Way Out of a Corner: An Assessment of the Relationship of Public Art with Neighborhood Violence
This study examines the relationship of blight reduction with violent crime in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We examine whether an initiative to paint murals in high-crime areas was associated with declines in calls for service for violent crime. This relationship was assessed by analyzing variation in calls for service in the areas within 500 feet of mural installations and at the block group level over a nine-year period. Our findings suggest the inf…
The Schrödinger's Cat of Gang Groups: Can Street Gangs Inform Our Comprehension of Skinheads and Alt-Right Groups
Given the current political climate, the mainstreaming of Alt-Right groups, and growing public concern, this paper argues that gang scholars are well situated to investigate these Alt-Right groups and their members. Qualitative and quantitative data collected from youth incarcerated within California's Division of Juvenile Justice are used to examine the differences and similarities between a range of individual-level risk factors and group-level…
Forecasting homicide in the red stick: Risk terrain modeling and the spatial influence of urban blight on lethal violence in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Gangs and Space
This chapter explores the ways in which space shapes the territoriality of urban street gang members as well as the ways in which a gang exploits the local landscape. It begins by providing a brief overview of the classic works on the emergence of gangs, paying particular attention both to the literature on human terrain/territoriality and to the ecological studies of place, especially the Chicago school. It then looks at the criminal enterprises…
Ctrl+ALT-RIGHT: Reinterpreting our knowledge of white supremacy groups through the lens of street gangs
For the last 30 years, gang scholars have explicitly disregarded white youth who are active in groups with overt or implicit ties to neo-Nazi/skinhead or white power ideologies from street gang research. This article argues that this decision to keep these two groups separate stems from a misinterpretation of the realities of these groups and this decision has had a long-standing impact on how researchers, law enforcement and policymakers underst…
Gang violence predictability: Using risk terrain modeling to study gang homicides and gang assaults in East Los Angeles
The Spatial Concentration of America's Rural Poor Population: A Postrecession Update
This article examines changes in concentrated poverty in the rural United States between 2000 and 2012. Using data from the decennial census and American Community Survey, we address three main objectives. First, we document changes in the number and share of counties with poverty rates above 20, 30, and 40 percent, stratifying our sample by metropolitan status. Second, we use exploratory spatial methods to identify geographic patterns in county-…
The George Wilson Effect: Does Intergenerational Closure and Collective Efficacy Reduce Juvenile Delinquency in a Neighborhood
A substantial amount of research found crime and delinquency to be lower in areas with stronger neighborhood communities, but the casual mechanism behind this association remains debated. The current study contributes to this debate by examining the association of two forms of social capital with rates of delinquency. The first, collective efficacy, has been widely studied, while the second, intergenerational closure has not. While the results su…
Rape Myths and Hookup Culture: An Exploratory Study of U.S. College Students' Perceptions
CRASH and burn: Abatement of a specialised gang unit
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the temporary disbandment of a gang unit on collecting gang intelligence and arresting gang members in one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Policing Areas. Design/methodology/approach – An interrupted time series methodology (ARIMA) is utilised to examine 1,429 field interview cards and 1,174 arrests of gang members that occurred from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 201…
Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how hi…
The Spatial Concentration of America's Rural Poor Population: A Postrecession Update
This article examines changes in concentrated poverty in the rural United States between 2000 and 2012. Using data from the decennial census and American Community Survey, we address three main objectives. First, we document changes in the number and share of counties with poverty rates above 20, 30, and 40 percent, stratifying our sample by metropolitan status. Second, we use exploratory spatial methods to identify geographic patterns in county-…
Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how hi…
Rape Myths and Hookup Culture: An Exploratory Study of U.S. College Students' Perceptions
East Side Story: Disaggregating Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles
This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted…
Gang violence predictability: Using risk terrain modeling to study gang homicides and gang assaults in East Los Angeles
Rivalries, reputation, retaliation, and repetition: Testing plausible mechanisms for the contagion of violence between street gangs using relational event models
The hypothesis that violence—especially gang violence—behaves like a contagious disease has grown in popularity in recent years. Scholars have long observed the tendency for violence to cluster in time and space, but little research has focused on empirically unpacking the mechanisms that make violence contagious. In the context of gang violence, retaliation is the prototypical mechanism to explain why violence begets violence. In this study, we …
The George Wilson Effect: Does Intergenerational Closure and Collective Efficacy Reduce Juvenile Delinquency in a Neighborhood
A substantial amount of research found crime and delinquency to be lower in areas with stronger neighborhood communities, but the casual mechanism behind this association remains debated. The current study contributes to this debate by examining the association of two forms of social capital with rates of delinquency. The first, collective efficacy, has been widely studied, while the second, intergenerational closure has not. While the results su…
Forecasting homicide in the red stick: Risk terrain modeling and the spatial influence of urban blight on lethal violence in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
CRASH and burn: Abatement of a specialised gang unit
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the temporary disbandment of a gang unit on collecting gang intelligence and arresting gang members in one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Policing Areas. Design/methodology/approach – An interrupted time series methodology (ARIMA) is utilised to examine 1,429 field interview cards and 1,174 arrests of gang members that occurred from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 201…
Ctrl+ALT-RIGHT: Reinterpreting our knowledge of white supremacy groups through the lens of street gangs
For the last 30 years, gang scholars have explicitly disregarded white youth who are active in groups with overt or implicit ties to neo-Nazi/skinhead or white power ideologies from street gang research. This article argues that this decision to keep these two groups separate stems from a misinterpretation of the realities of these groups and this decision has had a long-standing impact on how researchers, law enforcement and policymakers underst…
Gang injunction, What's your function? Investigating the relationship between civil gang injunctions and gang associates' patterns of association
Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream
The continued public presence of far‐right groups, particularly alt‐right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys) participating in mass demonstrations and protests across the United States has made it clear that these groups and their behavior remain a concern. The overall lack of knowledge among policy makers, law enforcement, and community residents on how to deal with alt‐right gang members has limited their ability to intervene and prevent violence. The mis…
The Schrödinger's Cat of Gang Groups: Can Street Gangs Inform Our Comprehension of Skinheads and Alt-Right Groups
Given the current political climate, the mainstreaming of Alt-Right groups, and growing public concern, this paper argues that gang scholars are well situated to investigate these Alt-Right groups and their members. Qualitative and quantitative data collected from youth incarcerated within California's Division of Juvenile Justice are used to examine the differences and similarities between a range of individual-level risk factors and group-level…
Territory, residency, and routine activities: A typology of gang member mobility patterns with implications for place-based interventions
Civilizing Space or Criminalizing Place: Using Routine Activities Theory to Better Understand How Legal Hybridity Spatially Regulates “Deviant Populations
Painting a Way Out of a Corner: An Assessment of the Relationship of Public Art with Neighborhood Violence
This study examines the relationship of blight reduction with violent crime in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We examine whether an initiative to paint murals in high-crime areas was associated with declines in calls for service for violent crime. This relationship was assessed by analyzing variation in calls for service in the areas within 500 feet of mural installations and at the block group level over a nine-year period. Our findings suggest the inf…
Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how hi…
CRASH and burn: Abatement of a specialised gang unit
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the temporary disbandment of a gang unit on collecting gang intelligence and arresting gang members in one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Policing Areas. Design/methodology/approach – An interrupted time series methodology (ARIMA) is utilised to examine 1,429 field interview cards and 1,174 arrests of gang members that occurred from 1 January 2010 to 31 December 201…
Rape Myths and Hookup Culture: An Exploratory Study of U.S. College Students' Perceptions
Gangs and Space
This chapter explores the ways in which space shapes the territoriality of urban street gang members as well as the ways in which a gang exploits the local landscape. It begins by providing a brief overview of the classic works on the emergence of gangs, paying particular attention both to the literature on human terrain/territoriality and to the ecological studies of place, especially the Chicago school. It then looks at the criminal enterprises…
Ctrl+ALT-RIGHT: Reinterpreting our knowledge of white supremacy groups through the lens of street gangs
For the last 30 years, gang scholars have explicitly disregarded white youth who are active in groups with overt or implicit ties to neo-Nazi/skinhead or white power ideologies from street gang research. This article argues that this decision to keep these two groups separate stems from a misinterpretation of the realities of these groups and this decision has had a long-standing impact on how researchers, law enforcement and policymakers underst…
Gang violence predictability: Using risk terrain modeling to study gang homicides and gang assaults in East Los Angeles
The Spatial Concentration of America's Rural Poor Population: A Postrecession Update
This article examines changes in concentrated poverty in the rural United States between 2000 and 2012. Using data from the decennial census and American Community Survey, we address three main objectives. First, we document changes in the number and share of counties with poverty rates above 20, 30, and 40 percent, stratifying our sample by metropolitan status. Second, we use exploratory spatial methods to identify geographic patterns in county-…
The George Wilson Effect: Does Intergenerational Closure and Collective Efficacy Reduce Juvenile Delinquency in a Neighborhood
A substantial amount of research found crime and delinquency to be lower in areas with stronger neighborhood communities, but the casual mechanism behind this association remains debated. The current study contributes to this debate by examining the association of two forms of social capital with rates of delinquency. The first, collective efficacy, has been widely studied, while the second, intergenerational closure has not. While the results su…
The Schrödinger's Cat of Gang Groups: Can Street Gangs Inform Our Comprehension of Skinheads and Alt-Right Groups
Given the current political climate, the mainstreaming of Alt-Right groups, and growing public concern, this paper argues that gang scholars are well situated to investigate these Alt-Right groups and their members. Qualitative and quantitative data collected from youth incarcerated within California's Division of Juvenile Justice are used to examine the differences and similarities between a range of individual-level risk factors and group-level…
Forecasting homicide in the red stick: Risk terrain modeling and the spatial influence of urban blight on lethal violence in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White
Painting a Way Out of a Corner: An Assessment of the Relationship of Public Art with Neighborhood Violence
This study examines the relationship of blight reduction with violent crime in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We examine whether an initiative to paint murals in high-crime areas was associated with declines in calls for service for violent crime. This relationship was assessed by analyzing variation in calls for service in the areas within 500 feet of mural installations and at the block group level over a nine-year period. Our findings suggest the inf…
Classifying Far-Right Groups as Gangs
The uneven response by law enforcement has resulted in the overall under-policing of far-right groups. Policy makers and the broader criminal justice system need consider proactive approaches if the goal is to prevent violence from far-right groups. A straightforward and appropriate approach is to treat far-right groups as street gangs. Existing gang statutes are a proven tool is aggressively used on BIPOC gangs and should be equally applied to f…
The Alt-Right Movement and National Security
Identifying the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol as an inflection point, this article analyzes the historical relationship between White supremacy and the US military from Reconstruction after the Civil War to the present. The article posits causes for the disproportionate number of current and former members of the military associated with White power groups and proposes steps the Department of Defense can take to combat the problems pos…
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same”: Research on Gang-Related Violence in the 21st Century—Introduction to Special Issue
The goal of this Special Issue is to examine the diverse nature of gang-related violence in modern life by providing insights into the growing complexities to better direct public policy solutions in the 21st Century [...]
East Side Story: Disaggregating Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles
This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted…
Civilizing Space or Criminalizing Place: Using Routine Activities Theory to Better Understand How Legal Hybridity Spatially Regulates “Deviant Populations
Alt‐right gangs and far‐right extremists: From the margins to the mainstream
The continued public presence of far‐right groups, particularly alt‐right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys) participating in mass demonstrations and protests across the United States has made it clear that these groups and their behavior remain a concern. The overall lack of knowledge among policy makers, law enforcement, and community residents on how to deal with alt‐right gang members has limited their ability to intervene and prevent violence. The mis…
Territory, residency, and routine activities: A typology of gang member mobility patterns with implications for place-based interventions
Rivalries, reputation, retaliation, and repetition: Testing plausible mechanisms for the contagion of violence between street gangs using relational event models
The hypothesis that violence—especially gang violence—behaves like a contagious disease has grown in popularity in recent years. Scholars have long observed the tendency for violence to cluster in time and space, but little research has focused on empirically unpacking the mechanisms that make violence contagious. In the context of gang violence, retaliation is the prototypical mechanism to explain why violence begets violence. In this study, we …
“Somebody’s Watching Me”: Surveying Police Surveillance of Gangs
Tension remains between how gangs are policed by law enforcement and whether such practices are overtly invading the privacy of citizens or infringing their Fourth Amendment rights. Such concerns have risen in the era of big data and predictive analytics. This chapter discusses the policing of gangs, both conventionally and through data-driven approaches. As the implementation and use of data-driven policing across the 18,000 police jurisdictions…
Gang Ecological Diversity in the Hollenbeck Area of Los Angeles, 1978–2012
Criminal street gangs are paradoxically both ephemeral and durable social forms. Unique gangs might emerge to only disappear a short while later, while others may persist for decades. These dynamics raise questions about the ecological diversity of gangs over time and space. This chapter examines gang diversity in an area of Los Angeles over a 35-year period. It looks to annual counts of the number of uniquely named gang cliques identified in gan…
Gang injunction, What's your function? Investigating the relationship between civil gang injunctions and gang associates' patterns of association
Population growth and its paradox: An investigation into the correlates of four forms of violence in a rapidly expanding suburb
The (non)offensive nature of “white power” music, a research note
The mainstreaming of extremist white supremacy's racist rhetoric over the last decade has facilitated the growth of far‐right violence in the United States. Music provides a vital tool in helping spread and integrate racist norms and values into the larger mainstream music ecosystem. White power music, from its inception, has been geared toward younger generations as a recruitment and messaging tool. This study examines the offensive nature of wh…
Crime Patterns and Interventions (20 works) · Criminology (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (11 works) · Geography (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Computer security (7 works)