Exposure to Crime and Racial Birth Outcome Disparities.

Urban communities in the United States were transformed at the end of the twentieth century by a rapid decline in neighborhood crime and violence. We leverage that sharp decline in violence to estimate the relationship between violent crime rates and racial disparities in birth outcomes. Combining birth certificate data from US counties with the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting statistics from 1992 to 2002, we show that lower crime rates are associated with substantially smaller Black-White disparities in birth weight, low birth weight, and small for gestational age. These associations are stronger in more segregated counties, suggesting that the impacts of the crime decline may have been concentrated in places with larger disparities in exposure to crime. We also estimate birth outcome disparities under the counterfactual that the crime decline did not occur and show that reductions in crime statistically explain between one-fifth and one-half of the overall reduction in Black-White birth weight, LBW, and SGA disparities that occurred during the 1990s. Drawing on recent literature showing that exposure to violent crime has negative causal effects on birth outcomes, which in turn influence life-course outcomes, we argue that these results suggest that changes in national crime rates have implications for urban health inequality.

Neighborhood Safety and Neighborhood Police Violence Are Associated with Psychological Distress among English- and Spanish-Speaking Transgender Women of Color in New York City: Finding from the TURNNT Cohort Study.

Transgender women of color (TWOC) experience high rates of police violence and victimization compared to other sexual and gender minority groups, as well as compared to other White transgender and cisgender women. While past studies have demonstrated how frequent police harassment is associated with higher psychological distress, the effect of neighborhood safety and neighborhood police violence on TWOC's mental health is rarely studied. In this study, we examine the association between neighborhood safety and neighborhood police violence with psychological distress among TWOC. Baseline self-reported data are from the TURNNT ("Trying to Understand Relationships, Networks and Neighborhoods among Transgender Woman of Color") Cohort Study (analytic n = 303). Recruitment for the study began September 2020 and ended November 2022. Eligibility criteria included being a TWOC, age 18-55, English- or Spanish-speaking, and planning to reside in the New York City metropolitan area for at least 1 year. In multivariable analyses, neighborhood safety and neighborhood police violence were associated with psychological distress. For example, individuals who reported medium levels of neighborhood police violence had 1.15 [1.03, 1.28] times the odds of experiencing psychological distress compared to those who experienced low levels of neighborhood police violence. Our data suggest that neighborhood safety and neighborhood police violence were associated with increased psychological distress among TWOC. Policies and programs to address neighborhood police violence (such as body cameras and legal consequences for abusive officers) may improve mental health among TWOC.

Using machine learning to estimate the effect of racial segregation on COVID-19 mortality in the United States.

This study examines the role that racial residential segregation has played in shaping the spread of COVID-19 in the United States as of September 30, 2020. The analysis focuses on the effects of racial residential segregation on mortality and infection rates for the overall population and on racial and ethnic mortality gaps. To account for potential confounding, I assemble a dataset that includes 50 county-level factors that are potentially related to residential segregation and COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. These factors are grouped into eight categories: demographics, density and potential for public interaction, social capital, health risk factors, capacity of the health care system, air pollution, employment in essential businesses, and political views. I use double-lasso regression, a machine learning method for model selection and inference, to select the most important controls in a statistically principled manner. Counties that are 1 SD above the racial segregation mean have experienced mortality and infection rates that are 8% and 5% higher than the mean. These differences represent an average of four additional deaths and 105 additional infections for each 100,000 residents in the county. The analysis of mortality gaps shows that, in counties that are 1 SD above the Black-White segregation mean, the Black mortality rate is 8% higher than the White mortality rate. Sensitivity analyses show that an unmeasured confounder that would overturn these findings is outside the range of plausible covariates.

The EmpaTeach intervention for reducing physical violence from teachers to students in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp: A cluster-randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: School-based violence prevention interventions offer enormous potential to reduce children's experience of violence perpetrated by teachers, but few have been rigorously evaluated globally and, to the best of our knowledge, none in humanitarian settings. We tested whether the EmpaTeach intervention could reduce physical violence from teachers to students in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp, Tanzania. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We conducted a 2-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial with parallel assignment. A complete sample of all 27 primary and secondary schools in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp were approached and agreed to participate in the study. Eligible students and teachers participated in cross-sectional baseline, midline, and endline surveys in November/December 2018, May/June 2019, and January/February 2020, respectively. Fourteen schools were randomly assigned to receive a violence prevention intervention targeted at teachers implemented in January-March 2019; 13 formed a wait-list control group. The EmpaTeach intervention used empathy-building exercises and group work to equip teachers with self-regulation, alternative discipline techniques, and classroom management strategies. Allocation was not concealed due to the nature of the intervention. The primary outcome was students' self-reported experience of physical violence from teachers, assessed at midline using a modified version of the ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool-Child Institutional. Secondary outcomes included student reports of emotional violence, depressive symptoms, and school attendance. Analyses were by intention to treat, using generalised estimating equations adjusted for stratification factors. No schools left the study. In total, 1,493 of the 1,866 (80%) randomly sampled students approached for participation took part in the baseline survey; at baseline 54.1% of students reported past-week physical violence from school staff. In total, 1,619 of 1,978 students (81.9%) took part in the midline survey, and 1,617 of 2,032 students (79.6%) participated at endline. Prevalence of past-week violence at midline was not statistically different in intervention (408 of 839 students, 48.6%) and control schools (412 of 777 students, 53.0%; risk ratio = 0.91, 95% CI 0.80 to 1.02, p = 0.106). No effect was detected on secondary outcomes. A camp-wide educational policy change during intervention implementation resulted in 14.7% of teachers in the intervention arm receiving a compressed version of the intervention, but exploratory analyses showed no difference in our primary outcome by school-level adherence to the intervention. Main study limitations included the small number of schools in the camp, which limited statistical power to detect small differences between intervention and control groups. We also did not assess the test-retest reliability of our outcome measures, and interviewers were unmasked to intervention allocation. CONCLUSIONS: There was no evidence that the EmpaTeach intervention effectively reduced physical violence from teachers towards primary or secondary school students in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp. Further research is needed to develop and test interventions to prevent teacher violence in humanitarian settings. TRIAL REGISTRATION: clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03745573).

Using a natural experiment to estimate the electoral consequences of terrorist attacks.

This study investigates the consequences of terrorist attacks for political behavior by leveraging a natural experiment in Spain. We study eight attacks against civilians, members of the military, and police officers perpetrated between 1989 and 1997 by Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), a Basque terrorist organization that was active between 1958 and 2011. We use nationally and regionally representative surveys that were being fielded when the attacks occurred to estimate the causal effect of terrorist violence on individuals' intent to participate in democratic elections as well as on professed support for the incumbent party. We find that both lethal and nonlethal terrorist attacks significantly increase individuals' intent to participate in a future democratic election. The magnitude of this impact is larger when attacks are directed against civilians than when directed against members of the military or the police. We find no evidence that the attacks change support for the incumbent party. These results suggest that terrorist attacks enhance political engagement of citizens.

Crime and Inequality in Academic Achievement Across School Districts in the United States.

This study investigates the effect of violent crime on school district-level achievement in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The research design exploits variation in achievement and violent crime across 813 school districts in the United States and seven birth cohorts of children born between 1996 and 2002. The identification strategy leverages exogenous shocks to crime rates arising from the availability of federal funds to hire police officers in the local police departments where the school districts operate. Results show that children who entered the school system when the violent crime rate in their school districts was lower score higher in ELA by the end of eighth grade, relative to children attending schools in the same district but who entered the school system when the violent crime rate was higher. A 10% decline in the violent crime rate experienced at ages 0-6 raises eighth-grade ELA achievement in the district by 0.03 standard deviations. Models that estimate effects by race and gender show larger impacts among Black children and boys. The district-wide effect on mathematics achievement is smaller and statistically nonsignificant. These findings extend our understanding of the geography of educational opportunity in the United States and reinforce the idea that understanding inequalities in academic achievement requires evidence on what happens inside as well as outside schools.

Violence and Vigilance: The Acute Effects of Community Violent Crime on Sleep and Cortisol.

The data combine objectively measured sleep and thrice-daily salivary cortisol collected from a 4-day diary study in a large Midwestern city with location data on all violent crimes recorded during the same time period for N = 82 children (Mage  = 14.90, range = 11.27-18.11). The primary empirical strategy uses a within-person design to measure the change in sleep and cortisol from the person's typical pattern on the night/day immediately following a local violent crime. On the night following a violent crime, children have later bedtimes. Children also have disrupted cortisol patterns the following morning. Supplementary analyses using varying distances of the crime to the child's home address confirm more proximate crimes correspond to later bedtimes.

Understanding why EmpaTeach did not reduce teachers' use of violence in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp: A quantitative process evaluation of a school-based violence prevention intervention.

EmpaTeach was the first intervention to address teacher violence to be tested in a humanitarian setting and the first to focus on reducing impulsive use of violence, but a cluster randomised trial found no evidence that the intervention was effective in reducing physical and emotional violence from teachers. We aimed to understand why. We conducted a quantitative process evaluation to describe the intervention implementation process (what was implemented and how); examine teachers' adoption of positive teaching practices (was the content of the intervention taken up by participants), and test mechanisms of impact underlying the program theory (how the intervention was supposed to produce change). Despite participation in the intervention activities and adoption of intervention-recommended strategies (classroom management and positive disciplinary methods), we show that teachers who used more positive discipline did not appear to use less violence; and teachers in intervention schools did not experience gains in intermediate outcomes such as empathy, growth mindset, self-efficacy or social support. Our findings suggest that the intervention did not work due to the failure of some key hypothesised mechanisms, rather than because of implementation challenges.

Declining violence and improving birth outcomes in the US: Evidence from birth certificate data.

The decline in crime that occurred in the last decade of the 20th century was one of the most important societal changes in recent US history. In this paper, we leverage the sharp decline in violence that began in the 1990s to estimate the relationship between county-level murder rates and individual-level birth outcomes for Black, Hispanic, and White mothers. Using the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting data from 1992 to 2002 and individual-level data from more than 30,000,000 US birth certificates, we employ two-way fixed effects models with a rich set of controls to compare births to similar women in the same county who experienced different crime rates during their pregnancies. Elevated murder rates are associated with substantially higher risks of low birth weight for White mothers, low birth weight and small for gestational age among Black mothers, and small for gestational age among Hispanic mothers. Sensitivity analyses show that the existence of confounders that would invalidate these inferences is highly unlikely, suggesting that we have identified causal relationships, even if some uncertainty about the precision of our estimates remains. These findings have potential implications for prenatal and postpartum care, and they add to a growing body of evidence showing that the "Great American Crime Decline" was strongly linked to improved outcomes among groups that experienced the steepest declines in violence.