Growing up in Gang Territory: Estimating the Influence of Organized Criminal Activity on Young Americans
Abstract
How does gang activity influence young children and adolescents? To studythis question empirically, we unite large-scale administrative student micro-data from a
large urban school district with maps of gang-controlled territory produced by the local
police department over multiple years. To validate the maps, we recruited a sample of
current and former gang members, as well as community residents familiar with gang
activity in this city (N=30 total) and conducted interviews that included a novel field
survey which interactively displayed gang territory for review. Respondents reported a
high degree of accuracy: 87 percent of the gang territories they reviewed were marked
as correct. Thus the combined data allows us, for the first time, to directly measure
childhood exposure to residential neighborhood gang activity.