A Block-Level Analysis of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries and Crime in the City of Los Angeles

Abstract

The liberalization of marijuana laws may have implications for neighborhood crime insofar as the distribution of marijuana through a dispensary system may provide additional opportunities for criminal behavior to take place. This project fills an important gap in the scant literature on medical marijuana dispensaries and neighborhood crime rates by integrating perspectives from environmental criminology and social organization theories in investigating the dispensary-crime nexus through interaction models and flexibly assessing dispensaries’ relationship to crime at different spatial scales. This study found the placement of a medical marijuana dispensary in the previous year to be associated with crime rate change, in both the block and the surrounding area, over and above predictor variables drawn from social organization theory. And, this study’s interaction models suggest that marijuana dispensaries may increase crime rates on socially organized blocks, with such blocks potentially experiencing a slight perturbation in their ecological continuity from a dispensary’s establishment.

Keywords:

• neighborhoods and crime
• drug policy
• environmental criminology
• social organization
• theoretical integration

Notes

¹ This statement should not be taken as implying that “smaller is better” in communities and crime research.

² I thank two of the reviewers for raising points regarding moderating mechanisms. I also thank a reviewer for highlighting the theoretical import of guardianship at the nexus of dispensaries and crime.

³ I assessed the spatial extent of the dispensary-crime nexus using the following buffer sizes: 400 feet, 800 feet, 1/4 mile, 1/3 mile, 2/5 mile, and 1/2 mile. I assessed goodness of fit with the pseudo R-squared statistic.

⁴ An inverse distance decay function implies that nearer blocks are more influential than more distant blocks (Rengert, Piquero, & Jones, 1999).

⁵ This same procedure was done for the creation of other spatially lagged independent variables. These spatial buffer measures guard against potential error in the geo-references in the police data that are greater in size than a census block, for they account for the area surrounding the block.

⁶ Please refer to this online supplemental material which describes in depth this procedure: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12074/suppinfo

⁷ Average household income and percent homeowners tap into social organization theory’s related concept of structural resources, which may be consequential for engendering capable guardianship on blocks (Sampson, 2008). Yet, such resources may provide additional opportunities for offenders frequenting blocks with a dispensary (Cohen & Felson, 1979).

⁸ Blocks with zero population were necessarily dropped from the analyses, given the inclusion of socio-demographics measures in the negative binomial regression models (see Bernasco & Block, 2011).

⁹ In the Figures to be presented below, all plotted values are present in the data.

¹⁰ Some gap exists between the law on the books and the law in action (Calavita, 2016). In spite of federal law generally making banking access difficult, some US states, such as Arizona, have tried to forge an un-prosecutable relationship between banks and dispensary owners (Stern, 2014). Findings from the present study are limited to the context of the City of Los Angeles.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Contreras

Christopher Contreras is a PhD student in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on neighborhood disorder, drugs and crime, public policy, and the community context of crime. He is a member of the Irvine Laboratory for the Study of Space and Crime (ILSSC).