Virtue Locales: An Exploratory Study of a New Criminological Concept

ABSTRACT

Place-based criminology largely centers on what and which areas attract or generate crime, with limited scholarly activity focused on which businesses/land uses prevent crime across spatial collectives. The current study proposes an original theoretical concept called “virtue locales” – which are race-specific land uses that reduce crime at the nearby area due to the virtuous effects these businesses provide to the community (e.g., social guardianship, place management, and social cohesion). Using a quasi-experimental design of street segments through propensity score matching, this study tests whether there are crime reducing effects of barbershops and beauty salons (virtue locales) in Columbia, South Carolina. Results from multiple count regression models show that street segments with barbershops and beauty salons (virtue locales) had lower crime counts than other streets with businesses, but no virtue locale. This finding remained in all areas of the city, regardless of racial composition. A number of policy, research, and theoretical implications are discussed.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr. Christi Metcalfe for her comments and guidance on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The accuracy of the businesses, their type, and geolocation were checked and validated through internet searches, as well as latitude and longitude verification. Missing businesses were manually inserted into the Infogroup dataset to ensure that all businesses of interest in the city were included in the dataset.

² Principle components analysis of all datasets produced high factor loadings.

³ Principle components analysis produced high factor loading scores – percent moved in 2010 or later: .909, percent renter occupied: .877, percent vacant house: .580.

⁴ Socio-demographic information of the block-group were given to streets where most of the street rested within. Thus, if a street segment rested between two block-groups, the block-group where majority of the street belonged to was given the socio-demographic information.

⁵ No highways, freeways, or interstates were considered in the analyses. Thus, either residential streets with businesses or business streets were considered. One or more businesses include virtue locales and/or risky facilities.

⁶ Note that many “treatment” and “comparison” streets were identical matches since they within the same block-group. Additionally, “other businesses” are the potential risky facilities that are found within that variable (e.g., bars, grocery stores, etc.).

⁷ T- estimates exceeding 1.96 and Cohen’s d scores greater than 0.20 results in covariate imbalance (Schnell et al., 2019).

⁸ Due to the nested nature of the data, multilevel models were also considered. However, after comparing the AIC and BIC scores from the single-level model using clustered standard errors and a mixed-effects negative binomial model, the single-level model produced AIC and BIC scores closer to zero than the multi-level model.

⁹ Spatial lag terms of 400-feet were used since this distance is often used in previous street segment crime literature (Groff and Lockwood 2014; Groff, Weisburd, and Yang 2010).

¹⁰ Several diagnostic tests were executed before running the analyses. There was no evidence of multicollinearity based on the condition index and eigenvalues. Anscombe and Deviance residuals were graphed to unearth any outliers. The graphs showed that one observation was an influential observation (outlier) with leverage, and was, therefore, removed from the data.

¹¹ Several sensitivity analyses were executed. This includes estimating models with no control variables, only block-group level controls, and only street segment level controls. All of these models still elicited significant, crime reduction relationships between Virtue Locale and crime counts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hunter M. Boehme

Hunter M. Boehme, Ph.D. is an assistant professor and Juvenile Justice Faculty Fellow in the Department of Criminal Justice at North Carolina Central University. He earned his Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of South Carolina. His interests include police use of force, police-community relations, geospatial crime analysis, and extremism.