A young man who runs with the Black Disciples was shot in the foot in a dispute with rival Gangster Disciples on Chicago’s South Side, the New York Times reported late last year. Days later, two Gangster Disciples caught a bullet in a drive-by a block away. The day after that, the mother of a Black Disciple was shot in the foot, caught in the middle of more crossfire between the two gangs.
These were just a few of Chicago’s 4,368 shootings in 2016, but they’re telling: So much gun violence in American cities follows this tit-for-tat pattern of vendetta between people who know each other. What if there was a way to anticipate that and break the chain?
A new study says it’s possible to do just that. Researchers Ben Green and Thibaut Horel at Harvard and Andrew Papachristos at Yale used a social contagion model and tried to predict gunshot victimization in Chicago between 2006 and 2014.
Using police records of people arrested together for the same offense, they mapped a network of 138,163 subjects and looked at the spread of violence within it. Their model, based on the ones epidemiologists use to understand contagion, assumed that shootings were likely to spread between co-arrestees, who would have close social ties and engage in risky behavior together. When they ran probabilities on people linked to a shooting victim, what they found was staggering: 63 percent of the 11,123 total shootings in the network were part of a longer chain of gunshot victimization. The closer someone was to a victim, the greater the risk of being shot.
[For more of this story, written by Michael Friedrich, go to https://www.citylab.com/crime/...ree-of-death/516402/]
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