Health Sciences and Kinesiology
Presenter(s): Jacy Sera, Elmer Camargo Pena, Olivia Lounsbury
Advisor(s): Dr. Jason Douglas
Legal drug properties, such as tobacco shops, are neighborhood-level institutions that (1) are prevalent in low-income communities of color, and (2) frequently associate with compromised community health and wellbeing. Our research was the first to identify crime and violence increases proximal to tobacco shops in South Los Angeles (SLA), CA. Yet, these initial findings only begin to address a major gap in our understanding of health compromising crime and violence associated with legal drug properties. Thus, the current paper seeks to examine temporal geographic crime and violence associations with tobacco shops, off-sale alcohol outlets, and medical and recreational marijuana dispensaries (a new legal drug outlet in California as of January 2018) in SLA. We accordingly conducted spatial buffer analyses to examine change in property and violent crime within 100-foot buffers of each property using 2015 and 2018 crime data. Following, we conducted spatial regression analyses to investigate the relationship between legal drug outlet density and property and violent crime at the census tract unit of analysis for both project years. Results indicated that property crime decreased significantly from 2015 to 2018 around medical and recreational marijuana dispensaries. Spatial regression analyses revealed that tobacco shops, but not off-sale alcohol and medical/recreational marijuana dispensaries, associate with property and violent crime escalations in SLA. Thus, our study findings indicate that medical and recreational marijuana dispensaries may have improved security and social controls that deter crime and violence. Furthermore, our research verified that tobacco shops continue to pose a public health threat that associates with crime and violence. Therefore, we contend that (a) additional research is needed to identify the mechanisms that connect tobacco shops to crime and violence, and (b) additional policies regulating tobacco shops will be necessary to improve health and safety.