Rethinking Community Organization and Robbery: Considering Illicit Market Dynamics

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Abstract
Research indicates that socially integrated communities experience lower rates of violent crime. However, we have a limited understanding of the specific neighborhood‐level processes accounting for this pattern. In particular, we know little about the convergence of informal control mechanisms and other contextual processes such as drug market activity. This paper addresses this issue by assessing the mediating role of drug markets and informal social control in the relationship between levels of violence and social structural characteristics of neighborhoods. Three research questions are examined: Do drug markets account for the relationship between social structural factors and robbery? Does informal social control mediate the link between social structural factors and drug market activity? Is informal social control directly related to robbery or indirectly through drug market activity? Results indicate that drug markets mediate the relationship between structural factors and robbery. After including drug markets in our models, the relationship between informal social control and robbery was no longer significant, suggesting that prosocial regulatory mechanisms reduce drug market activity, which in turn is associated with less violence.