Mural Art and Youth Victimization of Firearm Violence: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis

Abstract Community violence and firearm violence are persistent public health challenges in the USA. Guided by Busy Streets Theory (BST), we examine the effects that public art in the form of murals on police incidents involving youth as victims. We studied 248 mural sites in Detroit, Michigan, and used a 3:1 propensity score matching to identify sites without a mural for comparison purposes. We used kernel density of police incident data at 100, 200, 300, and 400 m bandwidth distances from the centroid of blocks with at least one mural identified by our community partners. We used Google Street View to verify if any control sites had a mural or public art that we were not aware of and removed them from the study. We also included several covariates (e.g., zoning, prior year police incident data, neighborhood disadvantage variables) in our analysis to eliminate alternative explanations. Our results indicated fewer police incidents for youth violent crime victimization post mural installation across bandwidths with decreasing effects for further distances. Our findings support BST because public art is a physical display of neighborhood attention and local care for the neighborhood and expands research on greening and vacant lot remediation by demonstrating that aesthetic enhancement of neighborhoods by public art can have similar salutary effects on violent crime victimization.