CINA Virtual Distinguished Speaker Series: Marie Tillyer “Place-Based Improvements for Public Safety: Public Regulation, Private Investment, and Changes in Crime at Micro-places Across 6 US Cities”

Join us on Friday, November 12 at 11:30 a.m. when Dr. Marie Tillyer, Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio discusses place-based improvements for public safety: Public regulation, private investment, and changes in crime at micro-places across 6 US cities. This event will be completely virtual.
 

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Research on spatiotemporal crime patterns reveals that crime is concentrated at relatively few micro-places (e.g., addresses, intersections, street segments), it tends to be stable over time, and changes at a small proportion of micro-places can have a considerable effect on a city’s overall crime level. These findings have prompted calls for targeted place-based interventions to efficiently allocate scarce prevention resources.  This presentation uses data from six unique urban landscapes (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and Seattle) to explore spatiotemporal crime patterns.  Specifically, we examine the relationship between two mechanisms for place-based improvements – public regulation in the form of municipal code enforcement and private investment in the form of building permits – and changes in crime at street segments over time.  The findings highlight how non-criminal justice policies, such as incentivizing targeted private investment and prioritizing code enforcement at crime hot spots, might be strategically implemented to enhance public safety.

Speaker Biography:

Marie Skubak Tillyer, who serves as Principal Investigator on the project, is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published over 40 peer reviewed journal articles, with a focus on violence, victimization, and the spatial distribution of crime. She is co-author of School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization (forthcoming, Temple University Press), a place-focused analysis of crime involving adolescents in schools, and current Co-Principal Investigator on a prospective, longitudinal study funded by the National Institute of Justice examining the cumulative financial costs of victimization among college students at minority serving institutions.  In addition, her past applied research has examined community supervision outcomes, violence reduction, crime analysis, and human trafficking.  Much of her research is informed by an environmental criminological perspective that examines crime events and the immediate spatiotemporal circumstances in which they occur. Her collaborations with Drs. Walter and Acolin, the project Co-Principal Investigators, have led her to apply this perspective to studying crime across various geographical units, including low-income housing developments, businesses, street blocks, and street segments.