Chances of Getting Shot

An interesting concept:

• If you and another person get arrested together in Chicago, you’re both part of a loose network of people with a high risk of getting shot in the future, Yale University researchers say in a newly published study.
  
  Only 6 percent of the people in Chicago between 2006 and 2012 were listed on arrest reports as co-offenders in crimes, the study says. But those people became the victims of 70 percent of the nonfatal shootings in the city over the same period.
  
  The study, called “Tragic, but not random: The social contagion of nonfatal gunshot injuries,” was published in the January 2015 issue of Social Science & Medicine. It shows the risk of becoming a gunshot victim in Chicago is “more concentrated than previously thought,” according to Andrew Papachristos, one of the authors.
  
  More than ever, the Chicago Police Department is borrowing ideas from academics like Papachristos to fashion anti-violence strategies. For instance, the department used his social-network theories to generate its own list of at-risk people.
  
  Police Supt. Garry McCarthy believes that list is helping his beat officers concentrate on those people most likely to become shooting victims — or to shoot someone else.

An attempt to build a usable tool. This is actually intelligent. Of course, this study points out a number of uncomfortable truths, the main one being that this over-reliance on Contact Cards for people that aren't part of these criminal networks are truly a waste of time. Then there's this: 

• Such social network analysis allows the manpower-strapped Chicago Police Department to “discern who’s at risk rather than casting the net really wide,” he said.

"manpower-strapped"? That damn shortage that everyone and their brother sees, except Rahm and Garry.

And this one:

• And as was previously known, race was a key risk factor in getting shot, the study noted. For every 100,000 people, an average of one white person, 28 Hispanics and 113 blacks became victims of nonfatal shootings every year in Chicago over the six-year study period.
  
  But Papachristos and his team sought to go beyond a racial explanation for nonfatal shootings. They were trying to explain why a specific young African-American male in a high-crime neighborhood becomes a shooting victim, while another young black man in the same neighborhood doesn’t, the study said.

Here's the SCC summary of the study - it took six minutes, not six years:

• If you engage in criminal enterprises, you stand a good chance of getting shot
• If you hang out with people who are criminals, you might get shot
• If you hang out with people who have a familiarity with guns, no moral compass, no conflict resolution skills and criminal intent, you might get shot
• This subset of a "social network" is comparatively small to the entire neighborhood it interacts with, but is supported in the main by a large portion of the neighborhood because it is the economic engine of the 'hood.
• Oh, and if you brush up against this "social network," as in my cousin, my play-cousin, my brother, my uncle, etc., you might be one of those "innocent victims" that aren't really that innocent.

Of course, this study summary isn't free - Rahm and Garry can have a check made out to "Bearer" and we'll take care of the rest.