Author: Kathiann Kowalski / Source: Science News for Students
AUSTIN, Texas — Fifteen-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was shot just eight days after she took part in the 2013 inauguration activities for President Barack Obama. In late April 2018, two young men are scheduled to go on trial for her murder in Chicago, Ill. Thousands more violent crimes take place in the United States each year. Many of the victims are teens.
Poverty, gang activity, the average age of residents and police resources are just a few of the things that affect where crime rates tend to be higher. Robert Vargas is a social scientist at the University of Chicago. He and his team say politicians also can affect crime rates by the way they draw the boundaries of whose homes will be in — or now out of — a voting district. Vargas talked about the work on February 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here in Austin.
Chicago is the third largest U.S. city. Its 2.7 million residents are spread out over an area spanning 600 square kilometers (234 square miles). As is true for many big cities, the area is divided into what are known as city blocks. Each block is determined by the streets on its edges. Often the blocks are rectangular in size. In Chicago, there are about five blocks (as measured on the long side) to a kilometer. That’s about eight per mile.
Vargas’ team focused on Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. It has a lot of Latino and African-American residents. Many of them are poor. Most violent crime in Little Village takes place within two big clusters of city blocks and one small cluster. That’s also true for Chicago as a whole, Vargas says. From 2012 to 2014, about half of Chicago’s violent crimes took place within just five percent of its city blocks.
Over time, the violent crime rate had started to fall in Little Village’s central crime cluster. The rate stayed high in the other large cluster, at the eastern edge of Little Village. Vargas and his team wanted to know why. So they probed.
When the boundaries shift
For the last several decades, the central cluster of Little Village’s high-crime blocks all sat within one voting district. The people here were all represented by one member, or alderman, on the city’s governing council. In contrast, parts of the large eastern cluster were spread across three different voting districts, with three aldermen. What’s more, the borders of who fell into which voting district there shifted several times.
The goal is to usually have roughly equal numbers of people represented by each governing official within some region….
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