Objectives: Research on violence around schools has produced varying and at-times directly contradictory results. Drawing conclusions from existing research is also complicated by methodological differences. The present study furthers research in this area using a novel open-data source.Methods: Police-recorded assault and personal robbery data from nine large US cities were used to test five hypotheses on patterns of violence around schools using fixed-effects models of daily block-group crime counts, such that results can be interpreted causally under reasonable assumptions. Results: The presence of a public secondary school in a census block group led to higher assault counts on weekdays when schools were in session but not on non-school weekdays, and the effect was larger for larger schools. The school-day effect for elementary schools was weaker and less consistent. At the city level, school days led to more assaults at school times but not in the evenings or overnight. The magnitude of these effects varied across cities. There were no consistent relationships between school presence on school days and personal robbery. Conclusions: The results were consistent with the routine activities approach, suggesting a role for schools in explaining the distribution of neighborhood violence. Studying multiple cities is important in the investigation of crime and place, and that open data may provide a mechanism for overcoming the data-access difficulties that previously limited multi-city studies of spatio-temporal variations in crime.
Matt Ashby (Thu,) studied this question.