health and society
The sad reality is that in America, ethnic background and zip code can be factors in someone's likelihood of becoming a victim of fatal or non-fatal gun violence. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians/Alaska Natives experience higher rates of gun violence nationwide.
Social, economic, and institutional factors, including resource-rich communities, weak gun laws, inadequate education and employment opportunities, and systemic racial inequality, all contribute to this disparity. . But to what extent do place-based community factors also contribute to, or protect from, this heightened risk? And how do these factors integrate to improve the lives of people of color? Will the community be more or less safe?
Bryce Hruska
Including Bryce Hruska, assistant professor of public health in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, David Larsen, dean and professor of public health in the Falk College of Public Health, and Margaret Formica, associate professor of public health and prevention. A team of researchers from Upstate Medical University, MD, is working to better understand these questions related to gun violence risk and potential urban design solutions for Syracuse.
Funded by more than $250,000 in a two-year grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the research team hopes their analysis of Syracuse's gun violence situation will have real-world implications as the city considers its future. I hope it can be applied. It is associated with the Interstate 81 viaduct project and other urban renewal projects across the country.
In this Q&A, Hruska, the study's lead researcher, talks about the study and its potential to influence the development of public policy aimed at reducing gun violence in Black communities such as Syracuse. I will tell you in detail.
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What environmental factors are you analyzing in relation to gun violence, and why is it important to look at them holistically?
We focus on four different place-based factors: residential segregation, vacant and abandoned properties, access to green space, and walkability (how easy it is to get around a neighborhood).
Existing research shows that each of these factors, when viewed individually, influences the incidence of gun violence. Gun violence tends to increase in more racially segregated areas. An increase in vacant and abandoned properties correlates with an increase in gun violence. When neighborhoods become more walkable, there are more opportunities for crime to occur. We're going to see a lot more violence. Access to green space is a protective factor, and gun violence tends to be lower in places with well-maintained parks.
Our research examines all these factors at once to see how they relate to each other and how these factors define different types of neighborhoods. By doing so, we are going one step further. For example, some neighborhoods may have higher rates of segregation, greater walkability, more access to green space, and fewer vacant homes. So they have two things that are protective. This means there is a lot of green space and few vacant properties, but there is plenty of isolation and walkability.
Despite these two protective factors, these areas may have higher rates of firearm violence. It shows that there is something particularly noteworthy about the combination of higher levels of isolation and walkability, and those factors should be targeted. I think of these as different levers that can be pulled to address gun violence. You won't really know which combination of levers is most important unless you look at them all together.
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How are multiple data sources integrated to inform this study?
We'll look at information from the U.S. Census Bureau and local data provided by the city about racism here in Syracuse. They have an open data portal that can be used to collect information about vacant and abandoned homes and walkability. You can find out about access to green space by working with local organizations and looking at what parks are on the map here in Syracuse. Leverages data from the Central New York Crime Analysis Center (firearm fatalities) and the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center (non-fatal firearm injuries).
Retrieving information from several different sources results in one dataset that contains all the information. of Elements we evaluate. We then use a statistical technique called latent profile analysis to capture these four different community-level factors and determine whether there are different neighborhoods that tend to have similar values on these different factors. Find out. This technique reveals how these place-based community characteristics interact to create neighborhood profiles that place Black Americans in particular at greater exposure to gun violence.
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How do you hope to apply this research and its findings to the public health field?
We are in a unique position here in Syracuse. Because we're tearing down Interstate 81, we're starting to redesign the neighborhoods around the city, we're redesigning the entire city. The work we are doing serves as a baseline. We can say, “Here's what Syracuse looked like now before the changes happened,” and the results can be reflected in policies and actions here in Syracuse.
For example, a recent public forum on the Interstate 81 project that included representatives and leaders from various communities discussed the need to make the area truly walkable for residents. That is wonderful. We want our neighborhoods to be walkable, but existing research shows there are some caveats to doing so. And if we don't address these other environmental aspects, making our places more walkable can actually become a problem and increase the incidence of gun violence if other factors aren't considered.
Our research helps inform these types of decisions. We are looking at how neighborhoods are changing along various dimensions, how these changes relate to gun violence, and how these data will shape these neighborhoods over the next five to 10 years. You will be able to learn about the current situation in your neighborhood in terms of how it will affect your design.
We hope these findings can be useful here in our own backyard, while also providing information that can be translated across the country. Gun violence has increased in many cities across the country in recent years, and we need to find effective ways to address it. Addressing the environmental characteristics that underlie this violence has been shown to be an effective way to deal with it. We are trying to create a more accurate way to identify which combinations of factors are most influential in creating safer living spaces for everyone.
