What is it about?
Is homicide in one's home community affected by homicide in nearby communities? What influence do poverty-reduction policies have on homicide? And what is the influence of environmental degradation on interpersonal violence? We answer these and other questions in this paper, examining homicide across Brazil's 5562 municipalities.
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Why is it important?
Our main contributions are twofold: substantive and methodological. Substantively, we are seeking a better understanding of the sources of lethal interpersonal violence, an understanding that can then be used to better guide violence prevention and reduction, improving citizen security. Latin America as a region has the world's highest (and increasing) homicide rates over last 10-20 years, so by examining Latin America's largest country at the subnational level we derive lessons that are generalizable to addressing a real-world problem across other countries in the region. Methodologically, we use geo-spatial methods that account for the fact that communities are interconnected -- not isolated from each other.
Perspectives
This research on homicide in Brazil is part of a larger body of my research that applies rigorous methods to study a prominent problem and advance promising solutions. The emphasis on the interdependence -- that violence in one place influence violence in other places -- is also part of my growing work that examines diffusion across a wide range of empirical areas, including the spread of ideas, disease, and violence.
Matthew C Ingram
University at Albany State University of New York
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Spatial Analysis of Homicide Across Brazils Municipalities, Homicide Studies, September 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1088767916666603.
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