Christopher J. Lyons
University of New Mexico, Sociology, Faculty Member
The rate of police-involved killings in the U.S. greatly exceeds that of other industrialized nations and is highly racially disproportionate. Yet, we know relatively little about the antecedents of police violence, and even less about... more
The rate of police-involved killings in the U.S. greatly exceeds that of other industrialized nations and is highly racially disproportionate. Yet, we know relatively little about the antecedents of police violence, and even less about what explains the distribution of police killings across space. We ask whether there is a connection between contemporary police killings in the U.S. and the country's unique history of racial subjugation and violence. We focus particularly on lynching era violence in the South between 1877 and 1950 during which vigilantes killed thousands of Blacks and hundreds of Whites. We propose three main pathways through which lynchings shape law enforcement practices today: legacies of racialized criminal threat, brutalization, and legal estrangement. Analyzing Mapping Police Violence data that provide a more complete picture of lethal police force than currently available government databases, we find that lynching, regardless of victim race, moderately associates with present-day lethal police shootings of Blacks. We find some evidence that lynching also associates with lethal shootings of Whites, although this finding depends of model specification. On balance, our results suggest that lynching's legacy for law enforcement may operate through enduring cultural supports for severe punishment.
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Cross-sectional scholarship demonstrates the importance of the U.S. racial structure in precipitating dramatic racial divisions in serious crime across neighborhoods. Yet, we know much less about the degree and sources of racial... more
Cross-sectional scholarship demonstrates the importance of the U.S. racial structure in precipitating dramatic racial divisions in serious crime across neighborhoods. Yet, we know much less about the degree and sources of racial disparities in how neighborhood crime changes over time, despite considerable evolution in the components of the racial order. We articulate a dynamic racial structural perspective that centers the unfolding nature of residential segregation in producing and altering racially structured socioeconomic realities. We contend that these racialized structural inequalities, in turn, lead neighborhoods on unequal paths of crime change. We assess this perspective with new panel data (circa 2000 and 2010) from the National Neighborhood Crime Study for 7,875 census tracts across 75 cities. Despite considerable socioeconomic upheaval and demographic change during the first decade of the 2000s, we find substantial disparities in neighborhood violence and burglary change that indicate the reproduction of the ethno-racial divide. Furthermore, our dynamic racial structural model explains much of these inequalities in crime change. A dynamic racial structure perspective lays a foundation for understanding the consequences of the evolving U.S. racial structure for unequal exposure to crime across neighborhoods over time.
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Spending time in prison has become an increasingly common life event for low-skill minority men in the U.S. The Bureau of Justice Statistics now estimates that one in three Black men can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime.... more
Spending time in prison has become an increasingly common life event for low-skill minority men in the U.S. The Bureau of Justice Statistics now estimates that one in three Black men can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. A growing body of work implicates the prison system in contemporary accounts of racial inequality across a host of social, health, economic, and political domains. However, comparatively little work has examined the impact of the massive increase in the prison system – and growing inequality in exposure to the prison system – on racial inequality over the life course. Using a unique data set drawn from state administrative records, this project examines how spending time in prison affects wage trajectories for a cohort of men over a 14-year period. Multilevel growth curve models show that black inmates earn considerably less than white inmates, even after considering human capital variables and prior work histories. Furthermore, racial divergence i...
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For over a century, scholars have traced higher levels of serious crime in minority compared to White neighborhoods to stark socioeconomic inequality. Yet, this research is largely cross-sectional and does not assess how ethnoracial... more
For over a century, scholars have traced higher levels of serious crime in minority compared to White neighborhoods to stark socioeconomic inequality. Yet, this research is largely cross-sectional and does not assess how ethnoracial differences in crime patterns evolve over time in response to shifting structural conditions. The new century witnessed substantial changes to the circumstances that undergird the ethnoracial divide in neighborhood crime as well as a national crime decline. How are the changing dynamics of urban inequality reinforcing or diminishing racial and ethnic disparities in neighborhood crime in the context of the “Great American Crime Decline”? We address this question by first identifying distinct paths of violent and property crime change between 1999 and 2013 for almost 2700 neighborhoods across eighteen cities. We then assess how initial and changing levels of disadvantage, housing instability, and demographics explain divergent crime trajectories within nei...
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Stark ethno-racial differences in reported neighborhood crime are a major facet of contemporary U.S. inequality. However, the most generalizable research on neighborhood inequality in crime across cities is only for 2000. Many of the... more
Stark ethno-racial differences in reported neighborhood crime are a major facet of contemporary U.S. inequality. However, the most generalizable research on neighborhood inequality in crime across cities is only for 2000. Many of the underpinnings of crime have changed since 2000—increases in socioeconomic segregation, the Great Recession and attendant housing crisis, the continuation of the crime decline, shifting trends in incarceration and other types of social control, and small decreases in racial residential segregation. We provide a much-needed assessment of whether ethno-racial reported neighborhood crime disparities have increased, remained stable, or decreased in the contemporary period. We invoke a racial structural perspective that traces ethno-racial disparities in neighborhood crime to the divergent community conditions emblematic of the U.S. racial hierarchy. Using newly collected data for 8,557 neighborhoods in 71 large U.S. cities for 2010–2013, we demonstrate that ...
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Research Interests: Criminology and Law
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Despite the continued importance of discrimination for racial labor market inequality, little research explores the process by which workers name potentially negative experiences as race discrimination. Drawing on the legal consciousness... more
Despite the continued importance of discrimination for racial labor market inequality, little research explores the process by which workers name potentially negative experiences as race discrimination. Drawing on the legal consciousness literature and organizational ...
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This study examines the relationship between crime and processes of urban revitalization, or gentrification. Drawing on recent urban demography research, we hypothesize that gentrification progressed rapidly in many American cities over... more
This study examines the relationship between crime and processes of urban revitalization, or gentrification. Drawing on recent urban demography research, we hypothesize that gentrification progressed rapidly in many American cities over the last decade of the twentieth century, and that these changes had implications for area crime rates. Criminological theories hold competing hypotheses for the connections between gentrification and crime, and quantitative studies of this link remain infrequent and limited. Using two measures of gentrification and longitudinal tract-level demographic and crime data for the city of Seattle, we find that many of Seattle's downtown tracts underwent rapid revitalization during the 1990s, and that these areas (1) saw reductions in crime relative to similar tracts that did not gentrify, and (2) were areas with higher-than-average crime at the beginning of the decade. Moreover, using a within-tract longitudinal design, we find that yearly housing investments in the 1980s showed a modest positive association with crime change, while yearly investments in the 1990s showed the opposite pattern. Our findings suggest a curvilinear gentrification-crime relationship, whereby gentrification in its earlier stages is associated with small increases in crime, but gentrification in its more consolidated form is associated with modest crime declines. Implications of these results for criminological theory, urban development, and broader crime patterns are discussed.