Linking Neighborhood Crime to Racial Diversity, Immigrant Concentration, and Ethnic Heterogeneity among Immigrants

The current study simultaneously examines the effects of various measures of demographic heterogeneity on neighborhood crime and their possible moderating effects. We estimated a set of negative binomial regression models with all three measures of demographic heterogeneity for testing their associations with crime in neighborhood. We also tested the moderation effects by adding multiplicative interaction terms in each model, respectively. Our findings show that racial diversity is not associated with most crime outcomes, or if it is, it has a negative association with crime. We also found that immigrant concentration is negatively associated with property crime but not associated with violent crime. Our measure of ethnic heterogeneity among immigrants shows robust crime-reducing effects for all types of crime. Moreover, we found that the well-known crime-reducing effect of immigrant concentration is more apparent in neighborhoods with low ethnic heterogeneity (thus, relatively high ethnic homogeneity) among immigrants. We discuss the important implications of our findings.