Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309

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Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/sste

Violent crime in San Antonio, Texas: An application of spatial

epidemiological methods
Corey S. Sparks ⇑
Department of Demography, The University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 West Durango Blvd., San Antonio, TX 78207, USA
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, 7703 Floyd Curl Drive, San Antonio, TX 78229, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Violent crimes are rarely considered a public health problem or investigated using epide-
Received 5 August 2011 miological methods. But patterns of violent crime and other health conditions are often
Revised 6 September 2011 affected by similar characteristics of the built environment. In this paper, methods and per-
Accepted 11 October 2011
spectives from spatial epidemiology are used in an analysis of violent crimes in San Anto-
Available online 22 October 2011
nio, TX. Bayesian statistical methods are used to examine the contextual influence of
several aspects of the built environment. Additionally, spatial regression models using
Keywords:
Bayesian model specifications are used to examine spatial patterns of violent crime risk.
Violent crime
Bayesian hierarchical model
Results indicate that the determinants of violent crime depend on the model specification,
Built environment but are primarily related to the built environment and neighborhood socioeconomic con-
Disease mapping ditions. Results are discussed within the context of a rapidly growing urban area with a
diverse population.
Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction to how individuals are embedded in their neighborhoods

1.1. Violent crime and health
More often than not, social problems and health out-
comes are correlated with one another. This is especially
the case for crime and health. In a broad sense, the ecolog-
ical or neighborhood determinants of health and crime are
themselves one in the same, or at least correlated (Keithley
and Robinson, 2000; Chandola, 2001; Ewart and Suchday,
2002; Cohen et al., 2003; Freedman et al., 2011). These
causes are often based on characteristics of the neighbor-
hoods in which people live. Many examples of this phe-
nomenon exist in the social science and health literatures
for outcomes such asthma (Lawson, 2009; Gupta et al.,
2010; Rosenfeld et al., 2010; Gale et al., 2011), cardiovas-
cular disease mortality (Borrell et al., 2004), certain cancers
(Heslop et al., 2009), and low birth weight (Auger et al.,
2008; Kramer et al., 2010). These associations often point
⁄
Present address: Department of Demography, The University of Texas
at San Antonio, 501 West Durango Blvd., San Antonio, TX 78207, USA.
E-mail address: corey.sparks@utsa.edu
and how as a result of this structural or nested relation-
ship, often times the individual’s health is affected in some
negative way. While these neighborhood characteristics
alone do not, for the most part, explicitly cause the adverse
health outcomes, they commonly act in an interactive
fashion with individual characteristics and behaviors to
produce an environment of risk for negative behaviors
and health outcomes.
One common form of risk experienced in neighbor-
hoods is that of psychosomatic stress and anxiety (Harries,
1997; Hill and Angel, 2005; Curtis et al., 2006; Agyemang
et al., 2007). A particularly effective stressor is high inci-
dence of violent crime and criminal behavior within neigh-
borhoods (Davey-Rothwell et al., 2008; Matthews and
Yang, 2010). While violent crime has been shown to be
associated with many stress-related illnesses, it is not
commonly studied from an epidemiological or public
health perspective (Keithley and Robinson, 2000) or with
methods from disease mapping (Zhu et al., 2004; Gorman
et al., 2005; Lawson, 2009).
Violent crime is one particular outcome that has the un-
ique distinction of crossing over between a social problem

1877-5845/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.sste.2011.10.001
302 C.S. Sparks / Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309
and health outcome. Homicide, aggravated assault and
sexual assault could equally be considered as important
public health problems as they are law enforcement prob-
lems (Keithley and Robinson, 2000). Additionally, the fac-
tors that precipitate violent crime and many adverse
health outcomes are highly associated. Dense urban devel-
opment, low land use variety, socioeconomic inequality,
poor housing, and low levels of community involvement
are all factors that have been shown in diverse settings
to influence both health and criminal behaviors (Sampson
et al., 1997; Foster et al., 2010). These factors are also often
also clustered in space, especially in cities and metropoli-
tan areas. This unequal distribution of risk factors results
in unequal risk of being a victim of crime, and potentially
other social or health problems for populations within
these areas. Since such clustering exists, studies of neigh-
borhood variation in risk should consider a spatial perspec-
tive because of the unequal distribution of socioeconomic
and environmental conditions within communities.
1.2. Social structure and violent crime
Following the ideas discussed above on how socioeco-
nomic inequality and community factors influence crime
rates, the connections between crime and sociological fac-
tors must also be discussed. The social disorganization
framework is ubiquitous in the literature on the spatial dis-
tribution of crime. As a result, this perspective has under-
gone much elaboration and revision over the past several
decades. Its core indicators, racial composition, residential
mobility, and poverty were expanded to include the role of
collective efficacy (Krivo and Peterson, 1996; Sampson
et al., 1997; Bellair, 2000; Morenoff et al., 2001; Browning
et al., 2004; Bellair and Browning, 2010), concentrated dis-
advantage (Massey and Denton, 1970, 1989; Kawachi et al.,
1999), proximity to public housing (McNulty and Hollo-
way, 2000) racial segregation (Krivo et al., 2009) and land
usage (Peterson et al., 2000; Hipp, 2007; Browning et al.,
2010), to name a few. There are several decades of empir-
ical validation of this component of social disorganization
(Sampson and Groves, 1989; Osgood and Chambers,
2000) but more complex nuances tied to crime-type, race,
and place dynamics are now being documented with some
specificity (Cancino et al., 2009; Hipp et al., 2009). Addi-
tionally, in terms of how social processes influence crime
over space, the social realm is often thought to affect crime
rates by a diffusion-like process. This perspective is often
referred to as the vector of transmission for crime (Mess-
ner et al., 1999; Baller et al., 2001; Matthews and Yang,
2010) and suggests that rates of crime are in some way
spatially structured similar to diffusion process. This sug-
gests that if an area is adjacent to another area where
crime is high, and shares some socioeconomic or built
environment characteristics with that area, that they both
may be at increased risk of crime occurring. Any statistical
model must be able to accommodate such an effect.
1.3. Hypotheses and specific aims
It is the purpose of this paper to examine the patterns of
violent crime within the city of San Antonio, Texas from a
spatial epidemiological perspective. Specifically, this anal-
ysis considers characteristics of the built environment
and socioeconomic conditions that are commonly related
to both crime and adverse health outcomes. Spatial pat-
terns of violent crime risk are examined using Bayesian
spatial statistical models and methods of disease mapping.
In addition to the methodological considerations, this pa-
per offers a novel use of data from a remote sensing source
to measure land use diversity within the city. The primary
hypotheses to be examined are twofold. Firstly, the ques-
tion of whether violent crime risk shows a significant pat-
tern of spatial variation within San Antonio is examined. If
such a pattern exists, then what are the neighborhood
characteristics associated with areas of higher risk. Sec-
ondly, of the measured characteristics of the built environ-
ment, which shows the greatest importance in this setting
in terms of explaining the pattern of violent crime.
1.4. The city of San Antonio
The city of San Antonio, TX is currently the seventh larg-
est city in the United States, with an estimated population
in 2010 of approximately 1.4 million people, is also one of
the fastest growing cities in the country. The city is situ-
ated within Bexar county in south central Texas and con-
sists of an area of approximately 1264 square kilometers.
San Antonio is an incredibly diverse city with approxi-
mately sixty percent of its population being Hispanic,
much higher than the national average of 16%. The city also
has numerous social and health problems including a pov-
erty rate in 2009 of over 18%, higher than the Texas state
rate of 16%; a teen birth rate of 39/1000 which is almost
double the national rate of 20.1/1000; a homicide rate of
6.9 per 100,000 persons, placing it 44th out of 77 metro
areas; and an obesity rate of 25.5%, which is below the na-
tional average of 28.9% (Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, 2008).
2. Data and methods
2.1. Description of data source
All data for the analysis are measured at the census
tract level using US Census geographies. In 2000 the city
consisted of 270 census tracts, but because of restrictions
based on population size and civilian population, 235 of
these are present in the analytical sample. The crime data
for this study come from the San Antonio Police Depart-
ment, and consist of individual records of reported crimes
between 2003 and 2006. These records consist of informa-
tion on the date that the crime was reported to have oc-
curred, the type of crime reported, the street address of
the reported crime, and the geographic coordinates of the
location measured in the State Plane NAD 1927 South Cen-
tral Texas FIPS geographic coordinate system. These coor-
dinates allow for each crime to be situated within the
Census tract in which it was reported to have happened.
This process was done for each year of data using the spa-
tial join tool in ArcGIS 10 (Environmental Systems Re-
search Institute (ESRI), 2010). Crimes corresponding to
 C.S. Sparks / Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309
four specific types were used in the analysis. These were:
homicides, rape, aggravated assaults and simple assaults.
During this period 263 homicides, 927 rapes, 18,350 aggra-
vated assaults and 26,410 simple assaults were reported
within the city limits of San Antonio. In comparison, the
FBI listed between 2006 and 2005 a violent crime rate for
San Antonio of 627 per 100,000 residents (Federal Bureau
of Investigation, 2005, 2006), while this study calculates
an average violent crime rate for the period of 1218 per
100,000. If non-aggravated assaults are eliminated, the
average rate in this study is 518 per 100,000, lower, but
more in line with that reported in the FBI data.
2.2. Independent variables
2.2.1. Alcohol availability
Several predictor variables are used in the analysis. Zhu
and colleagues (2004) found significant associations be-
tween density of alcohol selling establishments and crime
rates in San Antonio, so we control for these effects. Data
on locations of alcohol outlets were obtained from the
Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission’s (TABC) online
query system. These data consist of the street addresses
of every licensed establishment on file with the TABC be-
tween 2003 and 2006. These data were geocoded to Census
2009 TIGER/Line files (US Department of Commerce Cen-
sus Bureau, 2010) in ArcGIS 10 based on the street address
and ZIP code of the location of the business. The number of
establishments within each tract was calculated using the
GIS’s spatial join tool and expressed as the number of
establishments per thousand people in the tract.
2.2.2. Measuring land use diversity using remote sensing
sources
Land cover and built environment variables were ob-
tained through a variety of sources. The current analysis
uses a novel data source to measure land use within each
census tract. To measure the land cover for each tract,
the land use classifications provided by the United States
Geological Survey (USGS) in their National Land Cover
Database (NLCD) for 2001 were employed (Vogelman
et al., 1998; Homer et al., 2004). Since the NLCD 2001 rep-
resents a 27 level land use classification, these classifica-
tions were first simplified into their Anderson Level 1
higher level classifications, of which there are 10 classes
(Anderson and Hardy, 1976). These classes being: water,
barren land, shrubland, herbaceous vegetation, wetlands,
developed land, forested land, orchard or vineyard and
other cultivated or agricultural land. Each land use class
was recoded as 1 or 0 and ArcView 10’s Spatial Analyst’s
(Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), 2010)
zonal statistics tool was used to measure the proportion
of each census tract having each land use type. These pro-
portions are then combined and summarized using a stan-
dard measure of landscape diversity. The diversity of land
use within each tract is measured using Simpson’s diver-
P
sity index (Simpson, 1949), I ¼  p2i , where pi is the pro-
portion of the tract in land use class i. This diversity index
will be closer to one if a tract has equal portions of its area
in all of these land use types, and 0 if only one land use
type is found.
303
2.2.3. Other built environment variables
Three additional measures of the built environment
were also used. The first two are measures of housing in
each tract and are the percentage of housing units in each
tract that were vacant in 2000, and the proportion of hous-
ing in the tract that is rented. The final built environment
variable is the presence of a major highway in the census
tract. This variable is dummy-coded to indicate if a major
highway intersected the census tract.
2.2.4. Measuring socioeconomic characteristics
Sociodemographic and economic conditions of the
tracts were measured with an index of disadvantage. All
data for these measures were taken from US Census Sum-
mary File 3 at the tract level for San Antonio, Bexar County.
Three measures that together are aimed at representing
disadvantage within each tract were measured (Sampson
et al., 1997; Morenoff et al., 2001), these have been used
elsewhere in other analyses of social determinants of crime
(Matthews and Yang, 2010). Variables used to measure dis-
advantage were: the proportion of the population living
below the federal poverty threshold, the proportion of fe-
male headed households with children under age 18 and
the percentage of the adult population with a bachelor’s
degree or higher. These variables mimic the indices com-
monly used by other authors studying social disorganiza-
tion and crime to measure the concepts of neighborhood
disadvantage and residential instability (Kawachi et al.,
1999; Zhu et al., 2004; Hipp, 2007; Matthews and Yang,
2010). An index is not used in the present analysis because
the contributions of each individual each predictor are
potentially of interest, and collinearity between predictors
was a concern. Lastly, the stability of the population in a
place has been shown to be associated with crime rates
(Sampson et al., 1997), in this analysis the residential sta-
bility of each tract is measured using the proportion of
tract residents who lived somewhere else five years before.
All numeric predictor described above were z-scored prior
to analysis to eliminate differences in scale and to aid in
the Bayesian computation procedure.
2.3. Statistical methods
Since the main hypotheses are concerned with how var-
ious measures of the built environment affect crime rates,
and whether the risk of crime has a nonrandom spatial dis-
tribution within the city, statistical tools that allow for the
effects of these factors and allow the risk of crime in gen-
eral to be spatially structured must be used. To accomplish
this, the Bayesian hierarchical model commonly used in
disease mapping work (Clayton and Kaldor, 1987; Cressie,
1993; Waller and Gotway, 2004; Lawson, 2009) is used.
While it is often used to measure spatially structured var-
iation in risk of rare diseases, it has also found application
to crime analysis (Zhu et al., 2006; Matthews and Yang,
2010).
2.3.1. Model specification
Since the dependent variable is a count outcome (num-
ber of crimes), the outcome is assumed to follow a Poisson
distribution. As such, the distribution is strictly positive
304 C.S. Sparks / Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309
and discrete, which is why it is commonly used for count
outcomes. To examine the effects of the predictors de-
scribed above and to account for correlation in crime risk
over space, a log-linear Poisson hierarchical regression
model is specified as:
Y i  Possion ðEi hi Þ
In ¼ hi ¼ a þ X 0 b þ Si þ ei
where the number of crimes in each of the i tracts is a
function of the expected number of crimes, Ei, and a tract
specific risk, hi. We then express the risk as a linear func-
tion of the total mean (a), the ‘‘fixed’’ effects of the predic-
tors, X’b, a random unstructured heterogeneity (UH)
component, ei, and a spatially correlated heterogeneity
(CH) component, Si. This model is commonly called the
convolution model specification (Mollie, 1996; Knorr-Held
and Raßer, 2000) for the log-linear model.
The spatial correlated heterogeneity component is as-
sumed to have a conditionally autoregressive (CAR) normal
distribution, with mean equal to the average risk of the
neighboring j tracts for the ith tract, with precision param-
eter sS.
! chains. Results were derived from another 50,000 samples
1X 1 from the stationary distribution of the parameters, using
Si jSi  N Sj ;
n ji ni sS
Neighbors are identified using a first order Queen conti-
guity rule. Other neighbor specifications were examined,
and the results were robust to other contiguity-based
neighbor specifications. The unstructured heterogeneity
is specified as a normal distribution with mean 0 and pre-
cision se.
ei  Nð0; se Þ
The prior information is specified in a method similar to
that of Matthews and Yang (2010). Diffuse Gaussian priors
(mean 0, variance 1000) are specified for the regression ef-
fects (b’s) and the unstructured heterogeneity (UH) effects
(ei). The precisions of both the UH and correlated heteroge-
neity effects (Si) are given diffuse uniform (0,10 0) distribu-
tion priors on their standard deviations (Gelman, 2006).
Also of interest is the relative variation in the crime risk
that is spatial versus random. The proportion of variation
in the random effects attributable to spatially structured
variation is calculated using the ratio of random effect
standard deviations:
c ¼ sdðSÞ=sdðeÞ þ sdðsÞ
where sd(e) is the standard deviation of the random errors
and sd(S) is the standard deviation of the spatial random
effects.
2.4. Crime risk mapping
As suggested in 1.1, the application of disease mapping
methods has not been widely used in crime research. Spe-
cifically, one element of the Bayesian statistical methods
used in the current paper presents a very useful tool in
terms of visualizing patterns of crime risk. Exceedence
probabilities are often used in spatial epidemiology
(Richardson et al., 2004; Lawson, 2009) to show the degree
to which a geographic area’s disease risk is higher than ex-
pected. These probabilities work off the parameter h in the
above model specification. They are calculated based upon
the posterior distribution of h, and are generally given as:
Pr (h > x), with x being some value of theta that is hypoth-
esized, such as x = 1.5 (a 50% increase in risk) or x = 2 (a
doubling in risk). By mapping these probabilities, one can
visualize where the excess risk among observations lies.
Exceedence probabilities are calculated based on the pos-
terior distribution of each census tract’s h parameter, and
presented visually as maps.
2.4.1. Computing
The software R (R Development Core Team, 2010) and
the R package R2WinBUGS (Sturtz et al., 2005) were used
to prepare data for analysis and WinBUGS 1.4.3 (Lunn
et al., 2000) was used for parameter estimation. To esti-
mate model parameters, samples were drawn from the
posterior distribution of the parameters via multiple chain
Markov–Chain Monte Carlo simulation in WinBUGS. A to-
tal of 100,000 iterations were generated, and the first
50,000 were discarded as a burn in period for the Markov
every 100h sample to avoid autocorrelation in the Markov
Chains. This generated a total of 1000 samples for each
parameter in the model. Two Markov chains were started
at divergent ends of the parameter space and convergence
was assessed using the Gelman-Rubin diagnostic (Gelman
and Rubin, 1992). Two models are examined, the first hav-
ing only the unstructured heterogeneity (UH) component
and the second having the convolution (UH + CH) model
specified above. Model fit and improvement is assessed
between the spatial and non-spatial models model with
the Deviance Information Criterion (DIC) (Spiegelhalter
et al., 2002).
3. Results
3.1. Descriptive results
Descriptive statistics for the violent crimes, and for the
predictors used in the statistical models are presented in
Table 1. The descriptive statistics given are prior to z-
scoring.
The per-capita number of alcohol-selling establish-
ments was just over 4.5 per thousand people during this
period. Land use diversity was fairly low for the city, with
a mean of .21 (a 1 would be the highest diversity index va-
lue). This is most likely because all of the developed land
use classes are combined into a single ‘‘developed’’ class.
Highways are fairly common in the city, with both inter-
state highways 10 and 35 intersecting in the city. Vacant
housing is low on average with seven percent of houses
being identified as vacant. The measures of neighborhood
socioeconomic status show that 18% of the population in
an average tract live below the poverty line. On average, al-
most ten percent of households are headed by women with
children under the age of 18. The city has a relatively low
average proportion of college or professional graduates,
 C.S. Sparks / Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309 305

Table 1 judged to be ‘‘non-significant’’. The Bayesian credible inter-

Descriptive statistics for violent crimes and model predictors. val is likened to the confidence interval in classical statis-
Variable Mean Std. tics, but in this case, it has the direct interpretation that
Number of violent crimes 190 130.91 there is a 95% posterior probability that the parameter falls
Built environment within the interval given. The predictors in this model that
Alcohol est. per 1000 people 4.62 24.29 show evidence of influencing the crime rate are the density
Land use diversity 0.21 0.23 of alcohol establishments, the percent vacant housing, the
% With highway 0.74 0.43
% Vacant housing 0.07 0.05
poverty rate, the degree of residential instability and the
Neighborhood SES/structure proportion of housing in the tract that is rented. The alco-
% In poverty 0.182 0.12 hol establishment density is positively associated with
% Female headed households 0.095 0.051 higher crime risk, in support of previous work by Zhu
% More than HS education 0.025 0.031
et al. (2004). This positive association is also found for
Residential instability 0.171 0.131
% Rented housing 0.41 0.212 the vacant housing effect, which increases with the crime
rate. Poverty is positively associated with violent crime,
n = 235 Census tracts.
and the residential stability variable suggests that in more
transient areas, the crime rate is lower. This is contrary to
with 2.5%. Residential instability is fairly high in the city, much of the literature on this idea, and will be discussed
with seventeen percent of the population reporting that further below. Finally the proportion of the housing in each
they lived somewhere else in 1995. Also 41% of all housing tract that is rented has the largest effect on the outcome,
in the city is rented, not owned. This is not surprising be- with a positive association. While the female-headed
cause San Antonio is a fast growing city with a large mili- households variable and the education variable are in the
tary population. direction that would be expected (meaning having a
positive association with the violent crime rate), their
3.2. Regression model results HPD regions contain zero, and they are not considered
‘‘significant’’.
Prior to model construction, an ordinary least squares Model 2 is specified with both the UH and correlated
model was run to examine multicollinearity between pre- heterogeneity (CH) effects. In this model, the same pre-
dictors. No variance inflation factors over two were found dictors that were significant in the UH model are also sig-
and all predictor were entered into the model in a single nificant. While these predictors remains significant, many
block. Results from the Bayesian regression models for vio- of their coefficients are reduced in size (% vacant housing
lent crimes are presented in Table 2. Results presented are and % rented housing). When Model 1 and Model 2 are
the posterior mean for each fixed effect (b) parameter va- compared using the deviance statistics, Model 2 shows
lue, along with the 95% Bayesian credible interval. The lower total deviance, indicating it fits the data better than
two different model specifications are both presented for Model 1. When the model DICs are compared, Model 2
comparison. still shows a better fit, despite being slightly more com-
Model 1 is specified as a log-linear model with an plicated in terms of model parameters (pD in Model 2 is
unstructured heterogeneity effect (UH). While no tradi- higher). Finally, the c statistic shows that nearly 65% of
tional hypothesis tests are presented, if the 95% Bayesian the random effect variance is attributable to spatial vari-
credible regions for each parameter include zero, they are ation in risk.

Table 2
Results of Bayesian hierarchical regression models for violent crime outcome.

Parameter Model 1 (UH Only) b (95% credible interval) Model 2 (UH + CH) b (95% credible interval)
Intercept (a) 0.58 (0.284 to 0.037) 0.142 (0.269 to 0.025)
Built environment
Alcohol est. per capita 0.092 (0.007 to 0.175) 0.105 (0.027 to 0.179)
Land use diversity 0.023 (0.098–0.047) 0.007 (0.084–0.096)
Highway 0.065 (0.082 to 0.210) 0.035 (0.121 to 0.199)
% Vacant housing 0.168 (0.075 to 0.260) 0.156 (0.065 to 0.248)
Neighborhood SES/structure
% In poverty 0.189 (0.082 to 0.286) 0.250 (0.119 to 0.387)
% Female headed 0.070 (0.014 to 0.152) 0.005 (0.080 to 0.093)
households
% More than HS education 0.101 (0.190 to 0.015) 0.063 (0.157 to 0.032)
Residential instability 0.112 (0.216 to 0.001) 0.166 (0.281 to 0.050)
% Rented housing 0.275 (0.181 to 0.367) 0.269 (0.164 to 0.377)
rS  0.648
re 0.492 0.307
c – 0.679
Model deviance 1861 1854
Model DIC 2087 2083
Model pD 225.8 229.1
306 C.S. Sparks / Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309
Pr Ri
Ris
isk >1
1.5
5 Pr Ri
Legend
Census Tracts
Probability
0.000 - 0.038
0.039 - 0.500
0.501 - 0.900
0.901 - 0.950
>.950
San Antonio City
Bexar County
T xas Counties
Te
0 5 10 20 30
Kilometers
Fig. 1. Map of exceedence probabilities derived from the spatial regression model (Model 2) for various levels of excess risk.
One advantage of the spatial methodology used in this
analysis is the ability to visualize where within the city
the higher risks for each crime type occur. Fig. 1 shows
these effects for violent crime. The quantities being
mapped are the posterior exceedence probabilities that
the relative crime risk, h, for each tract is 50%, 100% and
200% higher than expected.
Fig. 1 shows the city of San Antonio within the context
of Bexar, County TX. Since data were only available for
tracts within the city limits, only a subset of the total area
of the county is in the analytical sample. The majority of
risk for violent crime lie in the east-central portion of the
city, east of the downtown area. Some elevated risk areas
are also found in the western and southwestern portions
of the city as well. When more restrictive exceedence rules
are used, i.e. h > 3, the areas of very high risk emerge.
Again, these lie in the downtown area and to the northwest
of the city. To further illustrate these areas, and their con-
text, Fig. 2 is used.
Fig. 2 shows the risk contexts for each of these areas.
The area to the northwest of the city (blue ellipse) is an
area that is composed mostly of medical offices and large
hospitals. It has a small residential population, with 91%
of the population living in rented housing, which suggests
that while the total number of crimes may be small, there
is higher crime than expected. The green ellipse on the east
side of downtown is a tract which encompasses the large
sports arenas in the city. Finally, the red ellipse is the
downtown area, specifically the San Antonio Riverwalk, a
popular tourist destination with over 90% of the housing
in the areas being rented.
4. Discussion
4.1. General findings
San Antonio is a rapidly growing city, and the sixth larg-
est city in the country. While the San Antonio Police
Department embraces the concept of preventing crime
through community oriented policing campaigns, the
deep-rooted heterogeneity and inequality within the city
continues to provide problems for such policing initiatives.
Rissk > 2 Pr Ri
Rissk > 3
The goal for this analysis was to examine how characteris-
tics of the built environment and the socioeconomic char-
acteristics of the city influence crime rates in San Antonio.
This study adds to the literature on the topic of violent
crime by using recent detailed spatial data on violent
crimes, and by controlling for several novel aspects of the
built environment. This contribution is also significant be-
cause of the use of the advanced Bayesian statistical meth-
odology used for parameter estimation and for model
inference, and the use of disease mapping methods to visu-
alize the locations of high crime risk areas.
The findings suggest that in San Antonio violent crime is
primarily influenced by characteristics of the built environ-
ment, notably vacant housing and land use diversity. Our
findings with respect these predicting factors correspond
well with previous studies of social disorganization, the
built environment, and crime including alcohol availability
(Zhu et al., 2004, 2006; Matthews and Yang, 2010). While
several of these studies found a stronger influence of ef-
fects of large highways, these were less significant in the
present work. As Matthews and Yang (2010) suggest, the
highways could serve as a ‘‘vector of crime transmission’’,
especially it seems for property crimes, but in this analysis
of violent crimes, this was not found to be the case. The
land use diversity measure derived from remote sensing
data is a unique contribution of the current paper, and pro-
vides evidence for the potential importance of the further
use of this kind of data in crime analysis and in analysis
of contextual influences on other behaviors (Entwisle and
Stern, 2005). While the measure of land use diversity used
in the present analysis did not contribute anything sub-
stantively to the model, it does suggest that perhaps an
alternative operationalization of this concept may be
worth pursuing in future work, especially with more detail
as to the types of diversity being measured.
Neighborhood disadvantage likewise played a role in
this analysis, and several differences were found on the
influences of these measures of neighborhood socioeco-
nomic status on the crimes considered. The measure of
neighborhood disadvantage which showed the only signif-
icant association with crime risk was the poverty rate. This
association is commonly found in sociological research on
crime (Sampson and Groves, 1989; Sampson et al., 1997)
 C.S. Sparks / Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309
Legend
Highways
San Antonio City
Census Tracts
Probability
0.000 - 0.038
0.039 - 0.500
0.501 - 0.900
0.901 - 0.950
>.950
Bexar County
T xas Counties
Te
0 5 10 20 30
Kilometers
Fig. 2. Map showing areas of San Antonio with very high crime risk and their contexts.
and was more influential on violent crime after accounting
for correlated heterogeneity in risk in the spatial regression
model. This suggests that the effect of the poverty rate may
be more prominent in certain areas of the city, and as
neighborhoods experience more disadvantage the risk of
violent crime increases. This is not a new finding, but taken
with the context of the other built environment predictors,
it may provide a basis for more detailed analysis of crime
victimization profiles and heterogeneity in crime risk in
San Antonio.
One unexpected finding was the effect of residential
instability in the regression models. Upon further exami-
nation of this effect, it was noted that the area of the city
with the highest level of residential turnover in the preced-
ing five years was the north and northwestern sides of the
city. These are also the areas of the city where the majority
of housing construction has occurred in the last decade and
likewise the area that has received the lion’s share of eco-
nomic growth. Large shopping centers and retail outlets
have been developed in the area, and it is by far considered
to be the most attractive housing market in the city cur-
rently. New high-end apartment complexes and new home
construction dominate this area. While in many cities, with
older established neighborhoods, residential instability
may be a negative aspect of the population, taken in the
context of this rapidly growing metropolitan area; it pro-
vides an area where crime risk is lowered. This effect still
307
Dettail of High Crim
me Ris
sk Areas
Medical Center
Sta
adium
m/Colosseum
Downtow
wn/R
Riverwalk
exists despite the inclusion of the rented housing variable.
This suggests that the combination of these two factors,
which presumably would be associated with one another
appear to be measuring a complex process, where the type
of residents and the type of rented property probably need
to be accounted for. In other words, in areas with a poorer,
less educated population, do the instability and rented
housing variables operate in the same manner as in areas
where the population is better off? This could presumably
also be measured by the age of housing, where newer
developments may have lower crime risk than older
neighborhoods.
4.2. Limitations
Several limitations exist in the present work. First, the
data come from only three years during the mid 2000’s,
and more temporal depth could reveal different patterns
in the crime risk. Secondly, the associations described here
are ecologically focused, and the characteristics of the indi-
vidual crimes cannot be controlled for. Nothing is known of
the victims or perpetrators of these crimes, and in many
cases this is often a very important determinant of crime,
especially violent crime. Lastly, the use of exceedence
probabilities has been noted to be highly sensitive to mod-
el specification (Lawson, 2009), and this was not examined
in this analysis.
308 C.S. Sparks / Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology 2 (2011) 301–309

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